The Joe Rogan Experience - #1392 - Zach Bitter

Episode Date: December 3, 2019

Zach Bitter is an endurance athlete, ultramarathon runner and coach. He recently broke 2 world records in running: 100-mile (11:19:18) & the 12-Hour record (104.88 miles).

What's up, Zach? Hey, how's it going? Good, man. How are you? Good, good. Thanks for having me back on. My pleasure. Hey, thanks for turning me on to those shoes you wear, too.

Those Ultras. Oh, nice. I started running with those. Yeah. I like them. I like them a lot. They're great. Uh-huh.

Which ones? You got the Lone Peak RSMs, I think? I've got whatever the trail ones are. Okay. Uh-huh. I like the wide foot, what's it called? Foot box? Foot shape toe box, yeah.

Yeah, toe box. what's it called? Toe box. Yeah, those are great. Cool, man. No, I'm glad you like them. And I feel like this is what you wear, so it gets me excited when I'm running. You know, it's really interesting when you dive into the world of footwear and stuff. And I learned this recently.

And the number one indicator of low injury risk, which is what runners are always looking for, they're going to minimize risk. So comfort is the identifier for that. So if you find yourself going into like a specialty running shop, ask them to try on a variety of different pairs, a variety of different models, and find the one that's most comfortable for you. And that's probably going to lower your risk to the lowest you can get from your footwear anyway. What if you like really smooshy ones? Aren't those supposed to be not so good for you? Yeah, no, that's a good question. I think it's one of those things where it's kind of half true, half not,

where you kind of have to look at what's the purpose of what you're doing. So the way I kind of describe it is if I'm trying to strengthen my lower legs, you know, I want that low cushion, that firm platform, because that's going to really activate the muscles in the lower part of the leg. But if I'm dealing with some lower leg issues or a little sore, I did a workout and my calves are kind of sore, my ankles sore, then cushion can be great because it's going to relieve that kind of initial impact on the lower part of your legs. And the caveat, though, is those impact forces have to go somewhere. So they're kind of going to move further up the kinetic chain. to go somewhere. So they're kind of going to move further up the kinetic chain. So what I usually tell people, if you're dealing with lower leg pain or injury, then you might want to consider

something a little more cushioned. And if you want, if you're dealing with something like in your knees or your hips, then getting rid of some of that cushion is going to just keep that kind of more precise foot plant and maybe alleviate some of those impact forces from ending up in those areas. But at the end of the day, the mechanics of it all are going to be the real driver. You want your foot to come underneath a bent knee because you're using your legs as kind of like a three foot spring essentially. So if you can get that foot plant under bent knee, it's going to absorb it in the way your body intends versus absorbing it in a way that could maybe send those impact forces into the wrong areas. That's really interesting. You know, I was watching a video with this guy who was in his

That's really interesting. You know, I was watching a video with this guy who was in his 70s who runs an under three hour marathon Yeah, and uh, he said that five years ago. He hired a coach It was just kind of crazy like a 65 year old dude hiring a coach but trimmed a bunch of time off of his marathon I think more than five minutes off of his marathon. I think it was quite a bit more than five minutes and uh, you know, he was Running for a long time before that, but yet a coach sort of shortened his time in finishing a 26-mile race at 70 years old. Yeah, it's never too late. Yeah. The bent knee is really important because a lot of folks who don't pay attention to the history of footwear

don't understand that this fat cushioned heel that everybody sort of thinks of when you think of a running shoe and you when you watch a lot of people run that don't know any better they run and they land on their heel which is sort of something that was created was it by nike is that what it was that created that fat bottomed heel thing yeah they i think they were the first one to do the offset where it was traditionally i think was like 12 millimeters where your heel would be that much higher than your forefoot um but i think even with when we get into kind of like say heel striking versus forefoot or midfoot striking heel striking is another thing where it's not inherently bad

uh it all comes down to what i was saying before where if you can heel strike but your foot is still underneath that bent knee you're probably not going to do anything too detrimental so like but it's not optimal right it probably depends on the specific runner and their oh really their particular gait yeah there's you could have like extra long legs or something maybe heel strike would work or extra short legs or what would it be yeah i don't know for sure if there's like a height thing that would do i think would maybe just come with like the mechanics of the way the person learned to run in the first place. And just maybe some nuances with the way their body is kind of more or less designed. But I mean, there's heel striking folks that are very, are not injury prone or have never gotten injuries or hardly ever get injuries.

But usually I think if you're doing that, that's probably because you're under that bent knee and you're not kind of having that point where your foot is out in front of your knee. And then you kind of have that straight leg, but at an angle where it's going to be, you know, not ideal for kind of absorbing those impacts. Yeah, that's the real bad one, right, is when people are pigeon-toed, when their knees kind of bend in, which I do see quite a bit. That's got to be terrible for your knees, right? seat quite a bit that's that's got to be terrible for your knees right yeah i mean i i couldn't say for sure but uh i think i think there's a lot of nuance and it ends up being kind of like an individual situation with a lot of these cases so it's hard to know for sure um there's probably people who can talk to mechanics better than me in hitler right you just run what was the what was the explain the record you broke you ran 24 uh in less well it was 100 miles and it's a 24-hour time period but you did it in 11

hours and 40 what minutes yeah so um it was yeah let me i'll explain a little bit so it was uh the event itself was called six days in the dome and really what it was was you could do anything from a 24-hour event to a 48-hour event to a six-day event and just see how far you could run within that timeframe. Six days. Yeah, I know there's some crazy people out there. So just wait till David Goggins finds that event. But yeah, so I've been, it's interesting

because there's not a lot of timed events that are necessarily structured for 100 mile or for like 12 hours. So a lot of timed events that are necessarily structured for 100 mile or for like 12 hours. So a lot of times you find yourself jumping into some of these other events that are longer in duration and just kind of using them as a way to try to run a fast 100 miler or a fast 12 hour. out to me because he he's known me for a while and knew that I was targeting fast 100 mile times and just said hey I've got this cool event set up at the Olympic training facility in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Pettit Center and I think it's gonna be pretty uh conducive for fast for fast times and uh and asked if I wanted to do it so uh I actually didn't have an ideal timeline to that I would have normally wanted to work with in terms of getting ready for

it. But the training went really well. And, uh, I went there targeting the a hundred mile world record, which was 11 hours, 28 minutes and three seconds prior to that. And ended up running 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds for a hundred miles. And then since we have like this a hundred mile distance and also this 12 hour timed event kind of structure, you can find yourself if if you're under 12 hours kind of double dipping and getting two events for the price of one i guess you could say so i kept running after i hit 100 miles and ended up going 104.88 miles total in the 12 hour time frame so that was another record yeah so it's two world records 100 miles in 12 hours dude six minutes and 48 seconds for a pace for 100 miles is fucking bonkers. That is so fast.

That's so crazy. That's such a fast pace, man. Yeah, you know, it's funny when you look at it, because I think sometimes people look at 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes, and there's not a lot of context in their mind unless they're kind of familiar with ultra marathon running but when you start to break it down into like the subcategories where it's like well that's like four like sub three hour marathons in a row or i can't remember how many or what the 5k time is there's like it's like 31 5ks at some

some time that's four sub three hour marathons in a row. Yeah. Wow. That's so crazy. That's so fast. And are you still eating mostly meat? So, you know, this gets brought up quite a bit, I think, because, I mean, I eat a ton of animal products for sure. But, you know, I wouldn't classify myself as a quote-unquote carnivore. Well, this is because the carnivore diet people want to claim you right and we discussed this kind of the last time you were here where you you take in a lot of

glucose and you you ramp up your carbohydrates considerably before a race but like what is what is your what is a daily diet let's say in training like you're preparing for something like this what's a daily diet for you like yeah yeah so yeah let's jump into that i think there is some nuance within that even because when you think of my lifestyle the way i like describe it is if you took a calendar year and you grabbed a single day out of there and you grabbed a day where i was at like a peak training day versus a recovery day those are like so drastically different in terms of my energy and my my energy demands uh so like things tend to fluctuate quite a bit and change quite a bit and i think that's oftentimes what confuses people because they want to, they look at

what I'm doing, say on race day, or they look at what I'm doing on one of my big workout days or my rest day and think that's what I'm doing across the board. So when you get the folks saying, oh, well, Zach follows a carnivore diet, they're probably looking at like a post-race recovery day where then I might be eating almost all just animal products, a lot of eggs, a lot of salmon, uh know, red meat, that sort of stuff. But if you pick a day out where I'm doing like a big training day, doing like a 30 mile run or something like that, that's where I'm going to kind of bring back some of the carbohydrates to try to supplement that activity. And the best way to maybe describe it is, you know, there's like this kind of train low, race high, or this carb periodization concept

that's getting more momentum behind it and more studies and science behind it too. There's some interesting folks that are looking into this in more detail. And if folks are really interested in doing a deep dive in it, there's a guy named Dr. Mark Bubbs. He wrote a book called Peak, and he kind of dives into kind of like some of the nutrition science, where it's been and kind of where it's kind of heading. And they highlight some of that. And one of the big things they're starting to recognize that even with the elite athletes, when you're periodizing your training like I do, you know, your nutrition should be being periodized as well. as well. You know, the science is pretty clear that like, if you're doing a workout and you take in glucose or fructose, I think most science says a two to one ratio is ideal for maximizing the amount you can take in that. I mean, you're going to give yourself an advantage. That's like rocket

fuel. So then it becomes a question of like, do you need that a hundred percent of the time? Or do you even want to do it a hundred percent of the time? Cause when we look at it, Can I pause you right here? When you say glucose two to one, like, what do you mean by that? Glucose to fructose. Because what they found out is when they started doing a lot of like the exercise science and nutrition was that the real limiter is your gut. So like on paper, So absorption? Yeah. Yeah. There's a finite amount you can absorb and you increase the amount you can you can absorb on average if you have that two to one ratio versus all of one

or the other so two glucose to one sucrose yeah interesting and now what what are the different sources for glucose versus sucrose like sucrose is simple sugar that you get is that more like a refined sugar yeah yeah you i think like uh, the, the way, like most, most like sports supplements and things like that are going to be designed to kind of meet those, those specific, because they're looking at the literature and they're seeing like, okay, this is how you optimize it. Powerade or Gatorade or something like that would be a two to one. Yeah. I'd have to look to see exactly if they have that, but my guess would be,

they would be if they're looking at, at the research and where that's kind of at. Um, but yeah, so like really when the question that I think needs to be asked with a lot of this stuff is like, if I want to make a workout feel as easy as possible, if I'm trying, if I can get in like say 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour, it's probably going to do that. Like my pace, my perceived effort at that pace is probably going to feel easier. But then you have to ask the question, like, how often do you need it to feel that easy? So for me, the answer to that is like, well, if I'm doing something really strenuous or something that's in a little bit of a gray area where it's just fast enough to dip into the glycogen stores, but just slow enough that I can do it for quite a while, like maybe even a couple hours, then you're kind of in this area where that could be an advantage for you from a performance

standpoint. But if I'm going out for an easy run of like 60 to 90 minutes, and it's going to be like a two to three out of 10 perceived effort anyway, like there's no real need for me to be hitting glucose during that or, you know, sports drink during that to make that feel even easier yet. Because my goal isn't necessarily to, you know, make an easy run feel even easier, I guess is the way to make it. It's hilarious that you call a 90-minute run easy. That was nothing, just a stroll, just a few dozen miles. Well, and I think that also brings up a really good point too where like a lot of this stuff when we're looking at carbohydrate usage and performance is we're looking at elite athletes. We're looking at folks that are training for like, you know, the Olympics, you know, sometimes they're even Olympic medalists

and that's just not a very good comparison. I think to the average person who's out there running because you know, their, their, their purposes are different. You know, their objectives are different. Their lives are very different. Like one is doing basically everything around a specific, specific date and distance and trying to run as fast as they can on that date. And another person may be trying to run as fast as they can, but there's so many other factors in life, like their work, their relationships, their, um, you know, the level of training they're actually able to have with the time they have. And then also like, you know, managing their own health and nutrition because like, you know, elite athletes don't have a very rosy picture in terms of long-term health either. So for someone who's like, you know, maybe 10, 20 pounds

overweight and is trying to run to get into shape or trained to get into shape or something like that, they're probably thinking just as much about health as they are about performance. So for them to be, you know, shuttling in 60 grams of carbohydrate every hour during training and racing is probably not the direction that they'd want to go. Now, when you get ready to do something like this hundred mile run, how many miles do you run on a typical day? And do you ramp that up or do you just give yourself a base and know that you can push through? Like how do you handle that? Yeah. So I'll build up my training. The way I kind of describe it is like, I'm always focusing on specificity kind of being King. So depending on the race distance and the intensity is kind of how I'm going to structure my workouts.

So the rule of thumb that I use is the closer I get to the workout, the more specific the workouts I do are going to be towards that race distance and intensity. Uh, so for me, what that oftentimes means since I'm training for like a hundred mile distance races is early in a training block, are going to be towards that race distance and intensity. So for me, what that oftentimes means, since I'm training for like 100-mile distance races, is early in a training block, I might be doing some like shorter interval work, like VO2 max, like an example, that would maybe be like a three-minute

kind of almost all-out effort, followed by like a three-minute recovery jog, and then another three-minute interval like that, some of those real short interval sessions. And how many of those would you do in a row? How many sprints versus recovery? Yeah, it'll depend. I'll start like pretty easy on the first one. When I first started, I might just do three by three on that. And, but my goal really is to every week is to kind of build volume within that. So that first week, it might be just three of

them, but by like, say the eighth week, I might do a total of like 24 to 27 minutes worth of volume within that VO2 max context. So it's, it's really interesting. Cause like, you know, I might do a total of like 24 to 27 minutes worth of volume within that VO2 max context. So it's, it's really interesting. Cause like, you know, I could go out on any one day and do like maybe 10 of those, but if I do that and then it takes me like a week and a half to recover from that session, it's not nearly as probably effective as if I spread that out a little bit and said did like five by three and then five by three, three days after that. Give your body a chance to recover and build versus just destroying it all in one and then feeling like shit for a couple weeks.

Exactly. I like to call it micro-stressing when I'm working with folks in my own training. I'm like, we want to micro-stress. We want to stress you just enough to elicit a response, and so you get stronger, and then we want to do that over and over and over again. Are you aware? I'm sure you are. You know who Pavel Tatsulini is?

Yeah. Yeah, so he's got this sort of concept when it comes to weightlifting with kettlebells in particular calling greasing the groove yeah whereas instead of doing all these sets to failure you would just do like half of what you're capable of and then do it again in in a more frequent pace like do it again rather you know do it again on wednesday do it again on friday and then give it again in a more frequent pace. Like do it again on Wednesday, do it again on Friday, and then give yourself a lot of time in between each individual activity too, particularly when you're training for strength. He actually recommends as much as 10 minutes of recovery in between sets, which is kind of crazy.

I mean most people don't have the time for that. Six sets is an hour in. I mean it seems like you're just laying around at the gym. People would, you know, if you were at the gym, people would mock you. But that's his protocol. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's, I think, you know, endurance is, I like to say, it's a patient person's game. So I think if you can build that volume in a micro-stressing or in a sustainable way, that's what's going to keep you or get you strong.

And it's also going to make it less likely to get injured how much time do you need like like if you got you know up to that insane pace that you did when you ran 100 miles when if you took like a week off or two weeks off how much would you lose not much in that amount of time uh especially at that intensity. So the thing is, is like the 648 mile pace, we need to be kind of relative about it. So like for me, when I'm out training, when I'm not, when I'm not, when I'm fully recovered, that's like a pretty reasonable pace from an intensity standpoint. So the interesting thing about ultra marathoning is race pace is sometimes faster than even some of your easiest runs in training. So your training is kind of all what we would call like over speed training. Whereas in most endurance events from

like the 1500 up to like the marathon, the majority of your work is going to be sub race pace. And then you're going to have like, depending on the program, you know, maybe 20, 30% of that be like over speed training. Why is that? Uh, well, just because the relative duration of the event is so long. Like, you know, I can't run fast or if I run too fast, then it's just going to end badly for me. Right. But why is that with marathons? Oh, well, because it's, it becomes, it's similar to strength training where like if the limiter

is like the amount of like stress you put on your body. So if I was going to train to peak in, say, a marathon, my max potential pace for that wouldn't be sustainable to do every run. So I'd be running too hard, too fast, too often. And then we'd get into that kind of situation that we were talking about before where you're starting to macro stress versus micro stress. So if you run a marathon, what is your standard marathon pace? So I'm a little goofy where I competed in high school and college, and then I did some marathons, but not really in a structured manner. And then I got an ultra marathon running. So I haven't really done what I would consider a real legitimate marathon training program.

So you're basically saying marathons are for pussies, right? Is that what you're saying? Just say it. I actually think marathon, I actually think marathons are maybe the hardest event of them all. I'll explain why, because you're going fast. Well, yeah, it's just short enough where you have to be pushing like a fairly intense pace, but it's just long enough where if you make a mistake, you're going to pay for that for quite some time. So you're on such a razor's edge and you're also just one tiny mistake away from things going really badly. And what you're saying about mistake, you're talking about a razor's edge, and you're also just one tiny mistake away from things going really badly. And what you're saying about mistake, you're talking about pacing, like if you go out too hard.

Yeah. I see your watch. What kind of watch are you wearing? It's a Coros Apex. Well, I've never heard of that one before. Is that a GPS watch, one of those? Yeah. They're a relatively new brand.

In running, I guess the two kind of big players historically have been sunto and garmin and uh corals kind of came to the market a few years ago they wanted to try to make like take that high-end technology but make it maybe a little more affordable and also make it user-friendly because now everyone's there they they care more about the post workout or the post run data that you're uploading to these platforms like Strava. So like Coral's kind of made it a big point to make it real user-friendly on that end. So you like, I get done with the run and I load it up to the app and it's up on Strava, like within a few seconds sometimes. And then you go dissect all the data, like how much elevation gain and loss, your pace per mile, all that.

And is this primarily a running watch? I mean, you could use it for running or cycling or hiking or mountaineering or anything like that it's got like all those kind of bells and whistles on okay so so if you're my question was like so if you're running how are you are you're checking your watch if you're doing a marathon you're making sure that you're not going crazy because it's is it otherwise you just have to kind of gauge it just based on the pack and based on how you feel yeah and i think that's actually a good especially when you get into ultra marathoning i think the metric that people should dial in the most is their rate of perceived exertion because that's something that's not gonna necessarily lie to you uh like if you base your thing your stuff off heart rate exclusively or a pace exclusively

you can find yourself like justifying something that's not necessarily where you need to be. And if something like that malfunctions and that was your like only compass, then you're in trouble. So I like when I'm doing my training and when I'm working with other folks, I like to use heart rate and I like to use pacing and stuff like that. But ultimately I'm trying to get the person to really understand like how hard is this effort and then across the board from like very easy to very difficult and then when it comes time to race we can kind of dial in like this is the intensity you're trying to look for so that they can kind of feel that out do you use a metric like do you say like how do you feel seven to ten yeah pretty much i i have a

scale of like one to ten that i'll use a lot of times and there's like a whole variety like most people are going to be using some sort of like, probably like zone system of training where there's like, there's numbers that are associated with heart rate ranges or intensities. And there'll be descriptors. And, you know, there's some that are like one through 20. There's some that are kind of one through five and then one through 10. And isn't that so, so weird too, right?

Because it's so it's subjective in the whoop, whoop strap is something i wear and it uses something like that like what's your perceived exertion i'm like i just push it towards the far right i don't know like what does that mean like it's it's so hard to gauge your perceived exertion especially when the workout's over yeah it was hard i went hard i went all out like what does that mean i don't know what that means you you know? Yeah. Yeah, it can be tricky, and it is very subjective. But I think it's one of those things where it falls into the same category that a lot of endurance events are, where you just got to be patient and really work on kind of understanding that. And you learn from experience, too.

Like, you find out, like, oh, I went and did this workout, and I thought that was the right pace and intensity, but it turned out to be a little too fast. Do you keep a training log? Yeah. And do you do you like write it on excel or something like that i basically just load all my stuff up to strava and then uh yeah so that's kind of like the go-to for most runners these days is i'm sorry but do you do you keep like a diary like today felt like this and this was an issue and i felt like i didn't have enough fluids or do you do anything like that? Not so much anymore. I did it a lot when I was in college and I did it a lot when I first started, when I was really trying to kind of learn my body and kind of learn what things mean and how I respond to them. But now I've been kind of doing it long enough where I have enough of an understanding of kind of how,

like when things go wrong, like why they did, or if something went really well, like why it did that. I don't feel like I need to take as detailed notes, but I think it's really valuable for someone who's, especially while they're trying to learn the rate of perceived exertion and kind of really dial those things in. It's probably worth a lot of, worth a lot, worth their time to write that stuff down so that they can look back at it and they have that resource available to them as they're kind of reflecting on things now say if you're getting ready to do something like this crazy 100 mile run trying to break a world record what what do you what how how much time are you giving yourself to really truly prepare for that is it based on what how you're at right

now like what your baseline is like what kind of preparation you've done before you knew that this race was available to you like how do you do that yeah no and this is this little we can kind of hop back to where i was talking about before because like when i was talking about the vo2 max workout stuff that's kind of early in my training plan because that intensity is very unspecific to 100 mile pace uh you know that's you know those vo2 max workouts are much closer to something shorter like a 5k so what are you trying to do with those VO two max workouts? You just trying to elevate your, your base? Yeah.

Like just like here, like there's the different systems of training and that's kind of a higher intensity system. So it's not very relevant to the race pace that I'm doing specifically, but it's not irrelevant to my overall like, uh, aerobic, uh, efficiency. So like by doing some of those faster stuff things, you can work on things like your form. And just because when you're running that fast, like things tend to be a little more dialed in.

And it just expands. Basically what you do is you give yourself kind of a bigger range of what your potential is going to be when you start focusing more in on like the aerobic side of things that we're going to see, like as I would move further down in the training plan. So once I kind of do that section of training, to answer your question though, like ideally I'll have maybe about, since I'm coming into most programs, not completely out of shape, like four months is kind of the sweet spot for me. If I was coming like off the couch, so to speak, six months would be a little more appropriate.

Are you ever off the couch, so to speak, six months would be a little more appropriate. Are you ever off the couch? Only if I'm injured and I've only been injured in any significant way since I started ultra running once for about five weeks. What happened? I had a stress fracture on my right sacral. What is that? It's basically like on your tailbone. Oh, ouch. Yeah. What the fuck happened? So what I think, I don i don't it's hard to know for sure but what was the way it was described to me when i was going in and getting that stuff checked out was what likely happened was i had such a history and kind of flat running that i was actually preparing for a race that had a lot more climbing and descending so i started changing my training to more climbing and descending and when i did that like uh one thing that sometimes happens when you're running a lot of flat hard surfaces is your like ankles and your hips can get pretty tight from that real like kind of uniform like

a mechanic that you're doing so like my range of motion was semi-limited so when i was doing some of that hard downhill and uphill running i just probably wasn't very efficient with my form and it ended up that kind of we're talking before those impact forces ended up in the wrong spot and then the stress fracture occurred. That is crazy. You broke your ass. You literally broke your ass. Like people always talk about, oh, he was busting his ass.

Like you actually did. So where is it, Jamie? Right there? Oh, Jesus Christ. So it literally is your ass bone. The really goofy thing about it too was when I first had the pain surface for that, it was kind of in like the like lower back glute area is where it surfaced. So I thought I had like a sciatic issue.

Like I went into the doctor and they were like, okay, let's try some like active release therapy and let's see if we can get this thing to loosen up. And we just were working on and working on it. And like, it would like clear up where I wouldn't notice it if I was walking around, but then every time I'd go for a run or try to go for a run I'd get that sharp pain right away and uh so after about I think it was maybe four weeks or so we just we had been doing a ton of active release a ton of mobility work and then uh like it wasn't going away so he's like well let's just get an MRI and see what's going on in there and they did the MRI got the results back and he said there's nothing there so you start running running again. So I started running again. I ran like, I think it was two or three

days, maybe very short, like two miles and then three miles, then maybe five or something like that. And then I got a call back from the doctor and he's like, oh, it turns out we took a second look at the MRI. There is a stress fracture. And I told him like, well, I've just ran the first three pain-free days I ever I have since this this issue oh it's a mind fuck yeah well and I think what he said maybe was going on there was it was I mean it was a very fine stress fracture it wasn't I mean sometimes when people have a fracture on their sacral it's like a big enough fracture where like it can be out for like a year and oh yeah yeah so it can be a really bad injury um but he said maybe the mobility and the

strength work i was doing while i had that to try to rehab kind of strengthen the areas around it enough that when i just was running flat really slow really easy that protected that area enough where i didn't feel the pain anymore so after that i think i took another like two weeks off completely just to make sure before i started building back up and then i started kind of building back up again. Do you ever run on one of those air runner things? You know, those self-propelling treadmills? I've been on one once before, but not in any like significant way.

They look pretty sweet. I love those damn things. Which one do we have? What is it? Who makes it? It's Airdyne, right? Airdyne makes it? The air runner?

Is that what it's called? Jamie will find out. But anyway, man, it's some percentage, 13, make up the number, 13% harder than actual. Assault Air Runner, yeah. Assault Air Runner, yeah. It's amazing. It's hard as fuck. I gave one to Bert Kreischer.

He's like, this is too hard. Because he likes using a treadmill and pretending he's really running when he's just picking his legs up and down, you know, but that makes you actually push. And so your calves get blown the fuck up, man. It's hard. It's really good. And it's, what does it say? What percentage does it say it's harder than actual running? Like if you were just running at the same pace.

Some people are like like running's hard enough why are we making it harder well the idea is that you go and run and it makes running easier uh-huh yeah sort of like running with weights on uh-huh but it doesn't give you an additional stress yeah it's not it's not pounding on your body you know it's not like you're you're doing anything that's going to injure you but it's it's called you you know you have to propel that thing you know it's for folks who don't know what we're talking about it's basically a very subtle you right like the the way the thing is structured and it's got tread on it and as you run you are the the thing that's making it move so there's no machinery it's not plugged in it's not like uh it's electronic and you you set the

pace and you just kind of keep up with it. It's not. You're making it run. So you're pushing it. And as you push it, it requires extra energy and extra effort. And that extra effort, when you actually go run on a regular road surface or a trail, it seems easier. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think it's pretty cool because, like, yeah, with the weighted stuff, like, you run the risk of potentially hurting something by adding that additional weight.

Like, they were doing these ruck challenges. I forget the comp. I think it was Train to Hunt or one of these competitions. They were making people wear heavy packs. It might not have been Train to Hunt. I think it was another – anyway, they would make you wear like a hundred pound pack and so the idea was they were doing these races with a hundred pound packs on which you can imagine is a fucking recipe for orthopedic surgeon visits yeah and so these people were getting kind of jacked up and they they i believe

they stopped doing that as a competition you know as a running competition but there's a few of those similar kind of competitions where they force you to do a bunch of physical activities and then bring your heart rate down and execute shots on targets and then run to the next station and do a bunch of physical activities. And they were doing that with heavy, heavy weights on and just really was a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would, that would be maybe good for if you're going to do like a mountaineering experience and you're going to carry a bunch of little stuff like you're doing

with hunting but even then you really should just ruck yeah just put the heavy pack on there's a company called outdoorsmans that makes a really good one it's called an atlas pack and it's essentially a pack frame but the back of it is a universal post like what you would use for weights, you know, like a weightlifting post for, you know, Olympic weights. You know, so those big round steel plates slide right onto it so you can get a 45-pound plate on it and then clamp it down. And so it's, like, really secure on you as opposed to, like, sometimes if you put too much weight in a pack, like, maybe it'll sit all at the bottom. This is, like, boom, right in the center of your back. And you cramp it down. And then, you know, you're really carrying all that weight, you know, on your hips, a little bit on your shoulders.

And it's all like really centered well. That's a good one for really training. But you don't fucking run with it. You just hike. Hike, yeah. It's hard enough. Get that strength and power. Yeah, hard enough just to walk with it.

Does it say what the hike yeah it's hard enough power yeah hard enough just to walk with it does it say how much what the extra percentage it is it's no i couldn't find like an official testing of whatever but uh one person that did a big deep dive into it said its uh main thing was to fix his gate or will improve running gate that 30 is a number that they read is like a sales like thing 30 i didn't hear that one but i couldn I thought it was like 13. But I couldn't find it. It was like a, I'm trying to find like testing or some sort of science on it. It doesn't seem like it's 30%.

Man, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. What the fuck do I know? What am I, a mathematician? But it's just excellent for training. Do you do any training on machines or is all your training essentially done on the road? The running is all pretty much done on the road

and the trails. I'll do like some mobility work and some strength work in the gym. And that's where I'll kind of go inside, I guess, for it. But yeah, you know, I've used treadmills and stuff in the past and I do use them from time to time. But usually if I have the option to go outside, I'll do that. And I mean, I live in Phoenix, so it's, you know, it's sunny most days. Cold day is 70. Yeah, exactly. I'm there this weekend, actually. Oh, yeah, that's right. You're at the, so it's sunny most days. Cold day is 70.

Yeah, exactly. I'm there this weekend, actually. Oh, yeah, that's right. You're at the, is it Comerica? Comerica Theater. Nice. Yeah, Friday and Saturday. I'm psyched.

Yeah. I love Phoenix. Yeah, it's the time of year to be there, for sure. Yeah, man. Right? What's the temperature there right now? Probably maybe 65 or so. I've been there before in the summer, in July when i used to do tempe improv and it was

like fucking 120 uh-huh well and that's that's the funny thing too because when i was training for that 100 mile 12 hour world record it was through the summer because the race was in august so my peak training was like 110 degrees some days and the funny thing too is the pettit center where i did the race it was actually built for speed skating and some hockey rinks so they keep it at like 60 degrees oh that's nice i remember one day when i was running it was like one of the hottest days this summer i'm thinking like i'm gonna race literally at half this temperature yeah so it's really funny when you when you see when you see that and i think uh i'm i'm no expert at it by any means but i think there's some pretty cool like studies and stuff that of the effects that happen when you are training in some of those extreme heats, like what

happens it for the way it was described to me is it kind of simulates training at altitude to a degree. So who knows? Maybe some of that makes sense. Well, it's similar to hot yoga, right? That's they're doing some studies at Harvard. I believe, I think it's Harvard. Someone was explaining the whole deal to me.

This is not something that I read, but essentially what they're doing is they're trying to find out whether or not hot yoga, these 90 minute hot yoga sessions replicate some of the known benefits of sauna. Because, you know, obviously the temperature is not as hot. They keep it, the hot yoga place I go to, I think they keep it at 105 degrees versus sauna, you know, gets much, much hotter than that. You're in like the 180s, which is what I like. But the idea is that when your body is extremely stressed, when you're doing these poses and you're sweating like crazy, that your body core temperature rises basically to a similar level than if you were just sitting in a sauna.

So you get a very similar response. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. than if you're just sitting in a sauna. So you get a very similar response. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. So I try to remember that when it's the summer in Phoenix so I don't get too miserable. You're bummed out by it. Yeah, you've got to be doing yourself good. Cronk Gym, which is one of the most famous boxing gyms in history.

Emanuel Stewart, who was just a wizard of boxing, and he trained Tommy Hearns and some you know, some of the, like the all time greats of that era, he would crank the temperature and this is in Detroit. They would crank the temperature up really hot. So you'd go into that gym and it would be that way, like for that specific reason. Cause he believed that it increased endurance. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting stuff, but I'll still take January and february for comfort now what do you do in terms of like how do you hydrate yourself and like what what kind of durations are we talking about like say if you're if it's 110 degrees outside 120 what was the hottest you ran at i think 110 is what i got up to and i try to get out relatively early

so that it's not like 110 from start to finish. So like if I get out, say at like six or seven in the morning, you know, it might be in the eighties, high eighties and be working its way up so that like I'm finishing and it might be 110. For my key workouts, the way I structure my training usually when I'm kind of in peak is I'll do my biggest workout in the morning. And then I might go out and do like a second run that's like a little shorter or quite a bit shorter in most cases and really low intensity. And, you know, then sometimes if it's the afternoon in Phoenix, that's when I would see

like that one 10, but I'm usually not out for more than like 45, 60 minutes for those. So hydrating is, is interesting because, you know, I grew up in the Midwest, so I was very familiar with running in hot, humid stuff in the summer. And the dry desert heat, though, it seems like you get thirsty a lot quicker and a lot more frequently. So one of the things I learned the first summer I was in Phoenix was knowing where the water fountains are and kind of planning your routes around that. You drink out of public water fountains? When I have to. Do you worry about cooties?

I haven't gotten anything too miserable yet. In i did a race earlier this year i think it was in early june called the san diego 100 and uh it's got this spot in the middle of the course where the aid stations are a little further apart there's like a nine mile stretch and a seven mile stretch and i kind of mistimed how much water i did so i filled up my water in a stream and it was probably not an ideal spot. Oh, dude. But I rolled the dice and I didn't get anything bad. My thought during the race was, this is the mindset in the middle of one of these things, is like, well, if something really bad happens, it'll happen after the race.

It definitely would, but it's really bad. Giardia is rough. I've never had it, but the people that I know that have had it say it's really bad. But you could just bring a SteriPEN.en yeah but you can't really stop huh yeah i mean in a race i wouldn't want to yeah and what what what really helped for me was the the situation is since the track rate since the race was on an indoor track 400 and like i think 42 and some odd meters uh i was doing a lot of my big long runs on a 400-meter track. Oh, okay.

So when I did that, I would just bring out like a cooler, and I'd have ice and water in there. Just have it sit there waiting for you. Oh, that's sweet. Yeah, that makes sense. But you do a lot of trail running though, right? I do some of that too, yeah. Historically, I've done a lot more flat, runnable stuff,

but now that I'm out in Phoenix, I like to try to split the year into two halves and do some trail stuff in half the year and then some flatter road or track or runnable stuff but now that i'm out in phoenix i like to try to split the year into two halves and do some trail stuff in half the year and some like flatter road or track or runnable stuff in the second half of the year do you bring water when you run trails do you bring like a backpack or something like that like one of those um you know what are those pack yeah yeah with the tubes what the fuck is that camels camel camelbacks yeah there's i'll do i don't usually use what they call like the bladder which is the tube thing that you're talking about they are and you can pack a lot of water um usually unless i unless i'm gonna be away from a potential stop long enough usually

what i'll do is i'll i'll use the pack but i'll have like smaller little like like little flasks soft flax in there okay so you bring those two that you like on the the chest straps i see a lot of people when they run with those but you like on the the chest straps i see a lot of people when they run with those but you're rolling the dice with that like you you got to know how much to sip yeah you know where to get greedy the pickup spots are for more run with friends yeah um when i run with my dog in the summer when it gets really hot i bring a hydro flask in a backpack and i'm one of those collapsible dog bowls because Cause you know, I don't want him drinking out of puddles and shit. And so, but that just having that extra couple pounds on your back, it makes a difference. You feel it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's why part of the reason why I

try to go as minimal as I can with water. If I, if I can get away with it, obviously, if I go out and do like a big loop where there's no potential stops, I'm going to have to carry it all from the beginning. But, uh, if it's a spot where I know, like I can get to water every five, six, seven miles, then usually I'll, I'll pack a little lighter and not be caring as much at any one given time. Do you hydrate up before you go? Yeah. I mean, I think that's the one, one of the hardest things to really get right in Phoenix

was just like kind of learning kind of how much you need to be hydrating like between sessions. Because what I usually found out is I could go out and kind of neglect hydration for any one given run or workout. But if I did that, then the next one I would probably pay for it. So for me, the big motivation to make sure I'm on top of hydration during any given run is because I know like if I don't, then the next one is going to potentially be miserable. Yeah, man, I've done that before. That's a weird feeling trying to do anything when you're dehydrated. It's like you have a bad battery or something. It's like everything is like, oh, come on.

It's amazing how just normal everyday life, like you could feel like a little run down and you barely notice it. But once you start physically exerting once you start training once you start doing something hard that's when you become like really in tune with how you're screwing your body up like drinking for instance like have a couple of drinks and then run like oh god you're like well this is what it's doing to my body yeah i gotta fucking stop drinking you stop drinking, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think you – I like drinking to thirst. That's usually what my gauge is.

And I haven't really had any issues with that. So there's no like strategy, like say I'm going to run 25 miles today. Let me drink X amount of liters of water before I go out? No. Before the run? Yeah, no. out no before the run yeah no i try not to like do too much like kind of like preemptive hydrating uh because i think what you what people oftentimes i think do then is they drink too much and then that comes at the expense of your electrolytes too because your body's

going to excrete those so if i'm if i find myself couldn't you just supplement you can yeah and uh i'll i'll do a lot more of that especially in the heat too just in general is like having a like electrolyte supplementation and things like what do you use for your electrolyte supplementation i use a product called hydrox mostly it's uh like a powder that you can kind of mix in with your water by a company named x endurance uh they have they make these little tubes now too where like so if i'm running and i have like one bottle with some in it already i can have these little like just these little tubes that uh if i refill and want to put more and i can just kind of take them out pop it off and and pour that in uh a lot

of other people will use you can make like little caps that uh um you just like swallow it with your water and it's got like the formulation of the different electrolytes in there kind of dialed in and um you know that's i think that's a little more hit or miss as to like like where people feel you need that some people tell you don't really need electrolytes at all you just need to salt your foods and things like that all the way to like you should be taking x number of these every hour um there's got to be science behind it right i mean do you are you taking getting blood tests and finding out what your levels are pre and post workouts or anything along those lines? Yeah, I haven't done any like post workout tests. I was part of the FASTER study, which was a study that looked at high carb and high fat athletes.

And I think they were looking at some of that stuff too. And like anytime I've ever had a blood test done though, by like my electrolytes, like my sodium potassium level has always been in range. So I haven't really tried to, it's one of those things then where it's like, I'm probably not going to try to fix something that's not broken. Right. And you're pretty diligent about your supplementation and things along those lines. Yeah. And I mean, I definitely am not afraid to salt my food.

You know, most of my food is conducive to putting salt on. So, you know, I'm probably getting quite a bit of that stuff just in my day-to- too. Do you have a specific salt that you like? Do you use Himalayan? Do you use sea salt? Like what do you, what do you like to use? Yeah, I like to get sea salt. Uh, lately I've been using, uh, this stuff called Redmond's sea salt. They, they get their salt out of like, uh, I believe it's in Utah and Salt Lake. Oh, okay. And I don't know like if the, how accurate or whatever this is, but like I heard that if you can and Salt Lake. Oh, okay. And I don't know how accurate or whatever this is, but I heard that if you can get an inland sea salt, it's better because it doesn't have as many potential toxins

that you're going to find in ocean sea salt. Mercury, things along those lines. Yeah, that's what the idea about Himalayan sea salt is, right? Because there's no real fucking sea in the Himalayas. Right. Is it called Himalayan sea salt salt or am i just making that up or is it himalayan salt i think it's sea salt right yeah the pink himalayan sea salt right yeah but how was it sea salt explain that how does that work was it an older sea i wonder if that's what it is and it's it's just like these big salt oh

it is just salt okay oh it's just him these big salt. Oh, it is just salt? Okay. Oh, it's just Himalayan salt? No? It both comes up. Oh, yeah. I think I've heard it. Like an old sea that's no longer there and they just have the big salt deposits.

Right. Like that's what a lot of Montana is the great Western inland sea, you know, like millions of years ago. Like they find seashells in Montana. Yeah. It's just fucking bonkers yeah it's crazy uh i was i was in uh utah earlier in the year i can't remember where we were just out of salt lake and apparently that used to be on underwater too and like they'll find like shark teeth and stuff like

that around there like and it's you're up on this like trail and they're like there's no water in think about that next time you see some asshole that would spend $10 million on a house on the beach. What makes you think that's going to stay there, man? He's going to pay for that eventually. Yeah, that is not going to be here. Something's going to be different in the future. It's always been that way. There's no permanent place where the water is or the water isn't.

Yeah, it is funny how we think of that, though, where it's like we see the map now and we're like, oh, okay, this is just how it is. And it's like, maybe not. Well, look at Pangea. Things change pretty goddamn radically. What's up, Jamie? I don't know the accuracy of this, but I just found this. Okay. Himalayan sea salt is a gourmet salt with a slightly misleading name.

It doesn't come from the Himalayan mountains. Oh, Jesus. And it doesn't come from a sea. These motherfuckers. However, it's definitely a sea salt. So it's not a total misnomer. Himalayan salt actually refers exclusively to Pakistani rock salt. Hmm.

That used to be sea salt hundreds of millions of years ago. So why don't we call it Pakistan? If I was Pakistani, I'd be pissed. Yeah. These motherfuckers are stealing our shine. If I was Pakistani, I'd be pissed. Like, these motherfuckers are stealing our shine. When a sea spreading over the region dried up, it was covered by geological shifts, leading massive deposits of salt scattered throughout the hills.

Odd name aside, Himalayan salt has a lot going for it. It's tasty. It's pink. And some even claim it has healing properties. Well, those fucking healing properties, assholes. Those are the people that like crystals. Yeah, that's what that is. We have a big Himalayan salt rock right there. There you go.

Feeling low, I'll just go lick that, I guess. Lick that, sucker. Has anybody licked that yet? Someone must have licked it when we weren't looking. Maybe. Yeah, I like Himalayan salt, though. It does. It's nice.

But for cooking meat in particular, I like kosher salt because it's got the big flakes. The flakes, yeah. When you put the big flakes on there, does that help retain the moisture on it? Allegedly. I don't know. I cook in a Traeger, which I find that the low heat and what I do is I cook at about 225 degrees, and they have a setting called super smoke. It sort of accentuates the smoke.

You know what a Traeger is, right? Yeah, yeah. For folks who don't know, it's a pellet grill. And what pellet grills are, they use something like this table. Like when they make this table, this is hardwood. This is made out of oak. They would saw the tree, and the sawdust in the past, they would just sort of throw out. Well, then they figured out where you can compress the sawdust in the past, it would just sort of throw out.

Well, then they figured out where you can compress that sawdust and turn it into these pellets using the natural sugars from the wood. So there's no chemicals at all. And there's a lot of like really good ones, but you know, the one that I use is a Traeger. And when they compress these pellets,

there's a heating element that's electrically fired inside the, the grill, that heating element turns into flame. It cooks the pellets and turns it into fire. So it's just fire and wood. It's really pure. So you're just basically cooking over wood. And you can perfectly regulate the temperature, and you do it on your app and all that stuff.

But because it's so well insulated, and I cook most of what I cook is wild game, which is very low in fat. So you really shouldn't cook at high heat or for any long period of time. You've got to make sure you monitor the temperature of the actual food itself. So I like to put it in there, and I get it up to about 125, 130 degrees, and then I sear it on a cast iron frying pan Usually in beef tallow Beef tallow There you go Is what I like

Yeah The best for that So I get some more Extra fats Healthy fats with that I've been doing a lot Of slow cooking lately I'll go in phases

Where I'll be grilling I gotta get a pellet grill Though those things Look pretty sweet I'll hook you up I'll have Traeger send you one Oh awesome That'd be great

Thanks in advance Traeger Once you use one It's like I have a regular grill. It's just fucking gathering dust. I don't even touch it anymore. Because you could do everything on this thing. And it's so easy to maintain the exact perfect temperature.

And again, for game, I'm not cooking at a high heat. I'm not worried as much about losing moisture or stuff like that. It's mostly a flavor thing. I really just love the flavor of like the salty on the outside. And then especially when it's seared, you know, it's just nice. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I think like the low and slow is the way to go for a lot of that stuff.

And when I do a, when I roast a, I'll get like a roast, I'll put it in a slow cooker and ultimately some of the fat will separate and kind of form on the top and always take that off and use it cook eggs and stuff later so it's oh that's nice yeah yeah a lot of people have their own idea about what to do and what not to do but i i learned this from a guy named chad ward whose uh label on instagram is whiskey bent barbecue oh yeah and he's a world champion pit master and this fucking guy can cook his ass off oh my god he's cooked for us a few times in in hunting camps and his food is insane he's so good and that's his philosophy is the reverse sear method is what i learned it from i learned it

from him a lot of times people will cook it they sear it on the outside and then they try to finish it off and you can do that that way but it's not as good it's better to bring it up to temperature slowly inside like a pellet grill another good method is sous vide do you ever sous vide things i i haven't yet i've had it from restaurants before though i was talking to someone they said a lot of restaurants now do that just so they can kind of make their all their stuff more uniform so you go and you get exactly what you did the last time. Yeah, no one fucks up. Because you can go to a restaurant, order medium rare,

and it comes out well done. You get mad. I've had that happen, right? But the sous vide method is fantastic too because say if you have a steak and you want that steak to be 135 degrees, you basically put the setting at 135 degrees and you can put it in there for four hours so when you get it it's just all the tendons and ligaments and all that stuff is just broken down

all the fascia is broken down and it's just so tender but it feels weird because you're boiling it in a fucking plastic bag it seems so wrong it's like you're not i mean i know it's a different kind of plastic but you're not even supposed to drink water if you're plastic yeah if your plastic bottle has been sitting in a hot car it's like how the fuck can you apparently you can it's not an issue at all you know to cook in it but it makes me feel weird eventually we'll hear in five years that that's gonna give us cancer i don't know man i don't think so i mean what is the reason why they can okay here we're going down a rabbit hole let's try it let's go down the sous vide rabbit hole why is it okay to sous vide your food and why doesn't it leak what is it bcps

is that what they're worried about bpas bcas bca bpa which is a bunch of b and a bunch of other letters which is supposed to be what you get there's probably some nasa scientist who figured it out though right maybe not man maybe the same guy who said smoking's fine oh you know remember the doctors prefer camel remember those ads yeah i mean you know i don't think we're dealing with that, but it just feels weird. But as far as flavor, it's a phenomenal way to cook. Particularly wild game, it's really good for because, again, you don't overcook it. Like if you want to cook an elk steak to 130 degrees and then blowtorch the outside, that's what a lot of people do. That's how you finish on a sous vide.

You basically use a fucking blowtorch uh-huh you know so i have this um i guess it's like the elon musk flamethrower in the background i literally could use that yeah because it's basically the same thing it's just a fucking torch and you torch the outside of it to get a nice you know caramelized crust and then the inside you know it's perfectly super tender yeah what does it say jamie you don't like it does it say it's gonna kill you the first one just says like there's after a considerable amount of research that's been done we believe the answer is it's safe and it's like they believe it is oh that doesn't mean anything left a little window well i feel like if

you don't cook in it every day like um when the director of The Cove was in here. I always fucking have a hard time saying his last name. Sohoyas. Louis Sohoyas was in here. He was explaining how he was eating a lot of fish before he became a vegan. He was eating a ton of fish. And his mercury levels really shot up. Because a lot of fish has a lot of fucking mercury.

And if you eat fish for morning, noon, and night every day, day after day after day, you can develop high mercury levels. But then I talked to other scientists. They said, yes, if you're eating it every day, all day. But if you just eat fish like once a week, you're fine. Like don't worry about it. Or even twice a week. So I was like, oh.

Did they say anything? Because I remember like when I think it was probably when the Mediterranean diet got popular, people were all in on salmon and stuff and seafood. And then everyone went wild caught. Yes. And I guess that's where you'd get the mercury. But then they would say, like, the farm-raised salmon are not as good for you for whatever reason. But then I guess now farm-raised is what you're supposed to get because that's gonna they can control that environment and make sure i heard what louis was saying was that it's even worse oh really yeah in terms of

like the heavy metals and talking because you gotta think they're just sitting there you know like it's like at least in the ocean they're they're migrating they're moving around they're swimming in different places like that that podcast that I did with him was so disturbing because I've always had this weird, not weird, um, just this sort of, um,

peripheral fear of what we're doing to the ocean. You know, this like thing like, man, how many assholes are out there? Just giant nets, just pulling fish out of the ocean right now as we speak. And how,

how much is that sustainable? Yeah. I mean, I think individual people fishing is sustainable, but that's not what's going on it's just huge nets they're just scooping up everything and the the conversation that i had with him scared the shit out of me for the future of the ocean because what was what's been done the amount of damage that's been done over a hundred years it's very similar to the amount of damage that was done sort of at the uh end of the um the end of the 18th century the beginning of the 19th

century in the united states where market hunters had basically wiped out almost every animal wiped out the buffalo do you know when they were shooting the buffalo they were basically shooting them for their hides and their tongues and they would leave the carcasses to rot, which is just insane. When you think about bison today, it's like one of the most cherished meats. Right. Because it's so delicious and so good for it and high in protein and tastes great. Yeah. But we basically almost wiped out every animal on this entire continent until they stepped in and decided to start regulating

hunting and stopping it and then sort of made concerted efforts to reintroduce animals. And still most of them are not at their historic range. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, you know, it gets interesting when you start looking into some of that stuff, but hopefully they get the bison herd back to where they need to. Well, they kind of have that. I mean, there's basically a healthy supply of bison but not the ocean the thing is like the

same thing that we did not we you and i weren't alive but that human beings did in north america they're doing right now the world is doing to the ocean yeah and there's no real concerted effort to reintroduce these animals or fish sure Sure. I see what you're saying. Yeah. So we're, we're essentially not learning from our past mistakes. Well, yeah, we're just, and it's also, there's too many people involved. The thing about the ocean is it's kind of unregulated, right? Yeah.

Cause who's is it? It's the wild West out there. It's just this big gigantic swath of, it's, it's basically like another world that's connected to our world. You know, it's a water world. We have the land world and the land monsters go into the water world with these floating little fucking killing machines and suck all the living forces and living beings out of the water world and then serve it up on rice

sushi i'm eating healthy you know but it's just, it's weird. Are you still doing, you were doing a podcast with Dr. Sean Baker, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a Human Performance Outliers podcast. We've been, I think we've got maybe 175 episodes now. So we've been going. So you guys are still all at it. Yeah, yeah. We're not, we had a stretch where we're doing about three a week, but we've kind of backed

off a little bit of that where just scheduling and stuff how do you do it do you do it over the phone yeah that's always the hardest part where's he he's he's uh down in in southern california okay and then you're in phoenix arizona and so do you have guests and do that over the phone yeah we'll bring them in and we'll record with like zoom video recording and then uh bring it up but that's always the hardest part is getting the audio quality for that. It's awkward too, right? Yeah. I really, I've only done over the last few years,

I did the Snowden interview, which I did remotely, and I did one with Dr. Anthony West, who's an Egyptologist. I did it with him. But most of the time when you do it with the with skype or anything along those lines it's like you're kind of talking over each other there's this weird delay it feels inorganic uh-huh yeah in person is the way to go yeah uh if you can do it so props to you for i just i mean i just don't i mean i just don't um i don't like it it feels i. I don't feel connected, right? It feels awkward.

Yeah. It doesn't make a good product, I don't think, as good a product for me. No, for sure. Yeah, you're taking a step back if you do remote, for sure. So, yeah, but it's been a cool experience just from a learning standpoint. I mean, I don't think we really have a specific direction. I mean, Sean's kind of the guy that everyone looks to from the carnivore thing so i think sometimes we get identified as carnivore but uh we definitely go down a bunch of different rabbit holes like we did um we've had a lot of like

some of the protein researchers come on and talk about some of that stuff like uh dr stew phillips or professor stew phillips uh professor don Lehman, professor, uh, what do you mean by protein stuff? Like different qualities of protein? Yeah. They're doing like the protein research. They're kind of the guys who are on the, doing some of the more recent research and looking at like, well, what are our protein needs for, uh, across like a variety of ages, as

well as when you introduce athletics and then like, what is the quality versus, or like, I guess maybe the best way to look at it as like the bioavailability of different protein sources and things like that. And I think there's, it seems like something that we've, we'd have figured out already. But there's, I guess, some nuance with that even. And now we're, they're saying that there's probably reason to believe that our recommendations should be higher than what they have been historically, especially for athletes and elderly folks. You mean the RDA? Yeah. Yeah. The RDA as it currently stands is basically just to prevent disease, right? Yeah. Something like that. And I think there, I think they maybe are learning more too about just kind of what role protein plays in bone health too, as opposed to

just because people think of protein as just this building block for muscle, but there's a lot that goes into it with, with bone, bone health as well. So those guys that were really interesting to hear, hear about, and, you know, we've done a lot of stuff with ranchers and some of the, like the savory Salatin folks come on the show and talk about kind of that practice versus kind of your standard agricultural production methods and things like that. Savory Salatin, you mean Joel Salatin? What is savory? What do you mean? Oh, like Alan Savory. So we've had Alan Sav savory joel salatin will harris from white oak pastures on um bobby gill

he's part of the savory institute come on and just kind of share with us like kind of where that stuff is at because i think there's a lot of uh guesswork and unanswerable questions at this point with with some of that stuff because we're projecting like you know way down the road with some of this stuff are you talking about the difference between grain fed versus grass fed meat? Yeah. And most specifically with those guys too, just like kind of what it's doing to the soil health and the soil quality. So one thing that I've learned that was interesting was that, I mean, we kind of start to like throw a lot of these different, like quote unquote, start to like throw a lot of these different like quote unquote regenerative type uh regenerative type practices into one like bucket or one category when in reality there's a lot of different variants

within them so someone can say like oh regenerative agriculture is going to save the planet and then someone will go dig up a bunch of studies that show like well no it actually doesn't do anything and then like yeah i'm confused in that because chris kresser's all in on this regenerative agricultural thing but is there is there real evidence that you can have a zero carbon gain yeah i mean it's uh because that's the that's the the the net positive the idea is that if you use regenerative agriculture meaning the animals graze there there's you're not talking monocrop environments that these cows graze on open fields of grass and then they shit all over the place and then you know that that shit becomes manure and that this actually helps the plant life grow and all this stuff sort of it all becomes a part of a cycle. And that this regenerative practice is actually,

instead of raising the carbon footprint, it actually makes a carbon neutral footprint. Yeah, yeah. And I think where sometimes it gets confusing is if you go and you just look at studies on regenerative agriculture, you get a lot of mixed information. So what I was told, and I'm still kind of going down this rabbit hole, and the way I like to look at all these type of things is I try to like look at one side of the story and then look to the other side and see where the counters are to that and just kind of go back and forth until you hit a dead end.

And then, you know, if you hit a dead end, like that's where you're at for now until something else gets introduced. I think it was maybe Will Harris told us this, that when you're looking for these studies on kind of what practice is going to be good in terms of like soil regeneration, you have to look up adaptive multi-paddock grazing. Because if you look up like holistic or regenerative agriculture, you're just going to get a whole mess of like different ranges or different types of it. And some are effective, some aren't. So it's really hard to kind of piece out, you know, who's got the accurate stuff and not. And I mean, I think ultimately some of this stuff is that we just don't know yet. And we're still learning. What was the one that's most, what did you just say? Adaptive multipodic grazing.

And what does that mean? It just means like you're, instead of kind of, you're, you're, it's a rotational grazing from what I understand, but you're kind of moving the, the herd along to these different products. And then they're like, you know, they're doing their thing in a, what would you consider like a natural way? Like it would have been before we came in and shot all the Buffalo and all that stuff. And then they're rotating it. So the way I've been under, I've understood it, like the more of those products you can get the better, because you're letting the the soil and the um and everything in there like really heal and and develop that deep root system as well as some

of that microbiome like all the insects and things that would be in there right and all that stuff um so you would need massive amounts of land and massive amounts of areas for them to graze i think i yeah i mean i think you would need i think the more the better is probably the way to look at it but um hopefully the the soil biologists aren't cringing they must be cringing yeah i'm sure they are and we apologize in advance but like the interesting thing though is like uh i mean i think there's a lot of work to be done in looking into this and finding out the best way to maybe utilize it but uh the thought the part that i thought was really interesting is with the will harris white oak pastures thing they – I think this study is maybe overutilized by like the pro-regenerative or multi-hepatic group to a degree because it's like it's what they have.

And it's what they're looking for. They're looking for a specific answer, meaning this is good. This is the way – we found a way where you can eat meat and not feel bad. Yeah, yeah. This is good. This is the way. We found a way where you can eat meat and not feel bad. Yeah, yeah. And the thing that's compelling about that study to me is the way it kind of happened was essentially what happened was Will Harris and White Oak Hatchers, they were raising animals for Epic Bar. Like that was one of their buyers. Oh, okay. And Epic Bar got acquired by I think it was General Mills.

Okay. And Epic Bar got acquired by, I think it was General Mills. And so General Mills looked at what Epic Bar was claiming when they were independent, and they were saying, like, our stuff is regenerative. You buy our product, and you're giving back versus taking kind of a mindset. And I think General Mills was skeptical about that. So they spent, I think it was like $80,000 to go in and have a study done on on will harris's uh white oaks pasture to really see if they could back that claim up um and they went in and they did the study and it actually showed like a net uh carbon sequestration versus like they weren't even neutral they actually pulled in more than

they put out so this is from epics particular type of farming that they well at least at white oaks pasture so i mean again that's one specific situation or one specific environment or area so i think where people run into maybe a potential problem is can we extrapolate that forward to other areas are we going to get that same result or is it going to be different right that's what's important to i mean it and it really is is important to look at that honestly because even though you do have this one area, is that because of the environment where this farm is taking place? Is it because of the particular soil quality? What are the factors that allow them to have – so it actually takes carbon out of the atmosphere, like a certain percentage. So instead of adding carbon, it actually removes some. Yeah, because I guess the way it was described to me is that the inputs of that type of system are so low that like you're not, like, because if you look at just a normal like agricultural setup,

you know, you have all these inputs of like manure and all these other things that are going to add to that, set up, you know, you have all these inputs of like manure and all these other things that are going to add to that, that net effect or that net negative effect of animal agriculture. So when you reduce the inputs down to next to nothing, because your inputs are all kind of just manpower where you're moving these things around and letting the natural course of things happen over time, that's where you can maybe minimize some of these, like, I guess what you maybe call a tertiary damage of animal agriculture. But, you know know, I think, I think we probably have a lot to learn and stuff with that stuff too, but it's, it's one of those things when I think about it, it's like, it, hopefully we're spending a lot of time looking at that stuff

because if they're right about the number of harvests we have left, I think, what are the estimates? We have like 60 harvests left. I mean, clearly, regardless of whether you're vegan, carnivore, or somewhere in between, we need quality soil, right? Right. What about hydroponic? Because I know that there are some large-scale hydroponic operations that are growing vegetables and things along those lines. And some people think that there's a real promise in that because you're not using soil at all. You not using you're not devastating the already depleted ground soil and you also don't need to do all the the harmful things that are involved in monocrop agriculture right like the the devastation on the wildlife the displacement of wildlife, pesticides, combines that are indiscriminately chewing up small rodents and bugs and rabbits and anything else that gets caught in their blades.

Yeah, yeah. You know, that'd be interesting. I don't know a whole lot about it other than what it is. So, I mean, I'm all for solutions. Yeah, somebody sent me a link to something, some indication that there might be some promise in hydroponic agriculture. But the thing about this whole idea, what was the name of the farm where this was done? The White Oak Pastures. White Oak Pastures.

Is that sustainable nationally? Forget about globally, but even nationally in terms of the needs, the needs that people have for, for beef. I mean, we, we use so much beef in this country. Yeah. I don't know for sure. Like what the scalability of that would be. My guess is like at this point it would be, cause it's pretty small, like even from a percentage standpoint of what is being, or how much of that type of a process is being

used. It's like a single percentage or something like that. So. Well, all grass fed meat, right? All grass yeah meat is like less than three percent yeah so it seems like we'd have a long ways to go uh but i mean i guess the the counter to that would also be we're essentially going back to what we would have been doing historically and uh so it's not necessarily like reinventing the wheel as much as it is just saying okay what we did here obviously is not sustainable or potentially not sustainable so let's look at well what we did here obviously is not sustainable or potentially

not sustainable. So let's look at, well, what did we do to get back to where we were before? I guess maybe is the way to look at that. But how did you get linked up with Sean? Because Sean is such a polarizing figure because he's the carnivore go-to guy and he's like a full-on carnivore zealot, as it were. I mean, he doesn't even, he thinks vegetables are bad for him. So I think Sean sometimes gets misrepresented and part of it is just like the way he interacts on social media and stuff.

But he's – I met Sean like before he I think went full carnivore, but on Twitter. I thought he was an interesting person not because of what he ate so much. What was he doing back then? What was he eating? He was, he was kind of more like high fat, low carb, I think something pretty similar to what I'm doing.

Maybe, maybe less carbohydrates since his activity levels are like really short and fast. And, you know, I just thought he was an interesting person because of his background. I mean, he's,

you know, a Highlands game athlete, professional rugby player. He's doing this high intensity. He's a gigantic dude. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's, uh, you know, a Highlands game athlete, professional rugby player. He's doing this high intensity. It's a gigantic dude. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's twice my size. Like, so it's like, my thought is like, okay, here's a guy who's has a similar nutrition plan that I do. Um, but he's doing the exact opposite athlete type stuff. He's twice the size of me. Uh, like it's, we're kind of two ends of the spectrum from like, uh, an athletic standpoint. So like, I was just interested in kind of like, you know, what he was doing and what he was up to.

And that's kind of why we started the podcast together. And, but yeah, I mean, when you, one of the things that Sean always says on the podcast, I think is, is kind of a better reflection on me is he'll say, I don't, the only thing I know for certain is that I'm wrong about something. So it's like, you know, it gets, I think it gets tough for someone like him who gets identified as the, like the face of the carnivore movement. Because then like you get all the positive and the negative coming your way too. And I mean, you can feed into that. But I mean, when we record our podcasts and stuff, I mean, he's a very open-minded person. We're looking for answers and we're asking questions and things like that. And it's a learning experience, I think, for me anyway.

Well, he clearly enjoys fucking with vegans. Well, yeah. He's been on this fruitarian kick lately, which is kind of hilarious. I didn't know there was that many of those people out there. Yeah. And one of them just died. One fruitarian doctor died during a fast. Oh, really?

Yeah, and Sean was talking about it on his YouTube channel. Yeah. There's people out there that think that you could just get by by only eating fruit. Jesus Christ, folks. You know, I've got a theory with social media and that stuff in general is that for a lot of the people who are most active on it, that stuff in general is that like for a lot of the a lot of the people who are most active on it it's like they're they either take it 100 serious or it's like kind of a joke or a game and then when those two polar ends meet it's that's where you get the big kind of like you like blow up interactions and then yeah and then it becomes a like kind of a game of like well the vegan told

me that like i should die or something like that so i'm gonna go tell that vegan that you know this or that and it goes back and forth back and forth back so stupid this is such a waste of time but the most interest the one i always get a kick out of though uh along those lines is someone will come up with like a picture of like here's here's the human's uh you know jaw system and this clearly means we're we're frugivores and then someone will say well look at the the digestive track of a human being. It is clearly designed more to be eating meat or animal products. And they go back and forth with different parts of the human anatomy to try to prove that we're vegetarian or vegan, fruitarian or-

The arguments are so stupid. And then I'm thinking the whole time, I i'm like so what we have here is people who can have have specific traits that are good for eating fruits and vegetables and some specific traits that are good for eating animal products so we're omnivores yeah it's it's biologically it's been established it's not there's no real controversy the controversy is fake particularly from the vegans where they say that we're herbivores and our jaws are designed to it's been established. Yeah. There's no real controversy. The controversy is fake. Particularly from the vegans where they say that we're herbivores

and our jaws are designed to crush, you know, roots and shit. Like, no, we had tools and fire for fucking hundreds

of thousands of years, you knuckleheads. You know who, one of my favorite podcasts we've done was with this guy, Dr. Bill Schindler. He's an archaeologist out of,

I think it was Washington University. And he's such a cool dude. He like told, well, he said something that was really resonated with me where he said, you know, humans, we're unique in that, like we've like over time developed ways to use like tools and things like that to liberate nutrients. So to look at anything in its raw state is kind of the missed the point of why humans are the way they are. Sure. Well, like lentils, right? I've seen this argument that human beings aren't supposed to eat meat because if we were, we'd be able to just rip it apart and eat it with our own teeth and go eat a squirrel with your face. Well, guess what? You can eat a squirrel with your face if you're so inclined. If you really wanted to do that, you could do it without tools. You know what you can't do? You can't eat a squirrel with your face. Well, guess what? You can eat a squirrel with your face if you're so inclined.

If you really wanted to do that, you could do it without tools. You know what you can't do? You can't eat a lot of beans without cooking them. Like, we've figured things out, folks. I mean, cassava. In the jungle, they figured out that you have to cook this stuff and strain it. And it's a primary staple of the diets of many people that live in the jungle. And it's fucking toxic as shit if you don't do that.

I mean, it literally produces cyanide. Cyanide is produced by cassava, which is like one of their primary foods. They just figured it out. Just like you figured out you have to boil lentils. Just like you figured out you have to cook beans. I mean, you can't eat most of these things that we eat are not good to eat if you just eat them in their raw state.

Some things like fruits are, some vegetables are. But some eat are not good to eat if you just eat them in their raw state some things like fruits are some vegetables are but some just are not and this is the same with meat and this this idea that you're supposed to be where we're clearly an herbivore because of the fact that we you know we're not supposed to be you know killing animals with our teeth like that's so dumb like we we kill animals with tools and we've done it for so long that our bodies have adapted we've adapted to the fact that we have clothes that's why we're not covered in hair you fucking idiots like this is not this is like real clear obvious stuff people who live in the coldest climates of the world aren't covered in hair you know yeah you know and it was interesting because

like what you're saying too when when we had bill on the show, he's got this unique experience where he's actually gone in and visited these indigenous tribes that have been relatively untouched by modern society to basically with the one question of like, well, how do you eat? So he's been, he's seen like a variety of different stuff. I think he even had a show on National Geographic for a while that looked into some of this, but he, like, just to show you the polarization of what humans can kind of do, he went and he visited the Samburo, which is a branch of the Maasai over in Africa. You know, they're basically drinking blood and milk for a huge portion of their nutrition. And, you know, so you have this tribe that's basically on a primarily animal-based nutrition plan, and they're super healthy. He said that they were maybe one of the most healthy groups of people he's seen from just like a physical stature, like tooth health and that sort of thing.

But then he also went down to – I think it was in South America. I can't remember the name of the tribe, but they found a way to basically liberate nutrients from a poisonous potato. Cassava. Is that what it was? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so I think it was – maybe potato and cassava is that what it was maybe that's what we're talking about oh okay yeah um yeah so the i think it was maybe it was cassava maybe there's other ones as well i think there is a purple some weird purple potato that has a similar sort of a toxic profile yeah and what he said was this this tribe that ate basically mostly potatoes what they would do is they'd literally dig like a pit and put like some, like thousands of pounds of these potatoes in there and let them sit there and like ferment, I guess, for like up to six months.

Oh God. And then they would actually make this clay that they would use. And cause there was still a toxin or something in there that they needed to kind of prevent from like interacting. Oh, this is something totally different. Yeah. So they would, they take this clay and they have this potato. And when they dip the potato in this clay it's it like binds to that toxin so it becomes it doesn't become an issue when you eat it so like by itself that potato

could potentially kill you i guess but with the clay it doesn't and uh so i was like how the fuck did they figure that that's what i want to know i'm just thinking like who how much trial and error goes into that it's like oh this guy dropped dead this guy dropped oh this guy lived I guess there's so many things like that in the jungle you just have to really wonder how do they develop all these different medicines and all these different ways of eating things it's just fascinating when like you're I guess when your only goal when you wake up in the morning is to find your next meal yeah and you know kind of build build enough around so that you can kind of survive like Like you put a lot of time and energy into it. But yeah, it is interesting to think like how they all got passed along

from generation to generation and how it got fine-tuned to where it is today. But I think it's cool to look at that stuff when it just comes to your own nutrition too and kind of when you understand like it's less about like this food is net bad for me or this particular food item is bad for me, or this, this food is this particular food item is bad for me across the board. And this one is great for me across the board more so about, well, this is what this food does well. This is what this one does well. So let's find like you mentioned mix and match to where you get, you get the profile that you're looking for. Yeah. I think the problem is what we're saying before is that people are entering into these conversations with this, this goal

that they want to achieve this goal being plants are bad for you or meat is bad for you or we're supposed to be only eating meat or we're supposed to be only eating plants and here's why. And you have this confirmation bias. You're not looking at any other piece of evidence. And particularly the biological variability of human beings is pretty incredible. I mean, I can eat peanuts all day long. If you're allergic to peanuts, you're dead if you eat one.

Yeah. I mean, we're strange creatures. And what is this changing? What do you got here, Jamie? The ancient. Oh, here it is. The ancient Andean tradition of eating clay may have helped to protect health. I think it goes back to ancient Egypt.

I was just trying to find out how far back this goes. Powerful Egypt. You can still buy clay dust right now. I was just kind of looking that up too. So eating dirt is good for you. Yeah. Or this kind of dirt. So they found a way to package the dust.

Right. Peruvian clay dust. This is a whole history on potatoes and how it changed the world. Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria, and human beings. We are dangerous organisms. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses,

but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat in the mountains. Wow, say that word. Guanaco and vicuna? Like llamas. Wild relatives of the llama lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The fucking llamas figured it out. The toxins stick, more technically absorb, to the fine clay particles in the animal's stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it.

Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a gravy made of clay and water. Eventually, they bred less toxic potatoes, though some of the old poisonous varieties remained favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them. Wow. That's interesting. That's crazy. But it tastes like shit, though. Still dirt.

Still eating dirt with potatoes. But look, people do what they got to do to stay alive. We're just so fortunate we don't have to do that you can go to crossroads and have a nice vegan meal if you you want to you're not really worried about staying alive anymore we're worried primarily about yeah about well you know people are worried about the environment they're worried about the health consequences of certain diets and the environmental consequences of certain diets and you know and these people this is what i've i've really gotten into after chris kresser was on the podcast recently debunking the game changers when he was talking about the positive net benefits of

regenerative farming i don't think that's clearly been established worldwide or in in large scale like in terms of and maybe it can be like can we do it right feed yeah yeah can we feed the entire country on that i mean i don't i'm not yeah you know i think that's i mean that's the million dollar question right now too right like well how are we gonna feed however many they're predicting like how are we gonna be the 10 billion people we're gonna see in x number of years and i i think it's interesting and it's certainly worth thinking about, but like, it's also like, well, how far do we keep kicking that ball down the road before we find ourselves in a situation where like, you know, then what's the next question? 15 billion, 20 billion and so on and so forth. And eventually

like, you know, we just overpopulate the world and it ends really badly for us well diseases usually follow overpopulation um i think the real key for us i think is going to be in i think this is within our lifetime is going to be lab created meat and i think they're really close to doing that and i think if you have some sort of ethical lab created nutritious meat where you don't have to worry about suffering or death if if this has been established then we open up a whole new avenue of exploration because now you can say okay all these people that are vegan for this moral and ethical sort of dilemma that they have with animal agriculture, killing animals, suffering. Let's take all that out.

Now you can eat lab-created meat that has absolutely no suffering attached to it. Let's find out how healthy things really are. And let's find out how many people stay vegan and how many people revert to more omnivorous diet, which, I mean, this is something that vegans hate to hear, but it is a fact. 84% of people who start a vegan diet quit. Now, is that because of taste? Is that because of, and then there's the argument that, well, people that do it over a long period of time, you get a higher retention rate.

That's fine, but 84% still is the number. I mean, it doesn't matter if you get a high retention rate for people that have been doing it more than two years or more than three years. Like, if you stick with it, you can do it. No, they're just more committed. But the reality is 84% quit. This is what's been firmly established.

What would the number be if there was ethical, humane, lab-created meat that had no suffering attached to it at all? It's just science-based. It's just made with compounds and whatever they use to create this stuff. That would be interesting. It'd be interesting to find out could we eliminate large-scale animal agriculture in favor of lab-created meat and what if any environmental factors would there be that would be negative that were attached to lab-created meat because you got to think whenever you're making anything right industrial large-scale you're going to have

waste what is that waste can that waste be mitigated can they figure out some sort of a way Whenever you're making anything, right, industrial, large scale, you're going to have waste. What is that waste? Can that waste be mitigated? Can they figure out some sort of a way to have some sort of net positive effect where that waste is utilized in some sort of a form where it actually can contribute to the natural processes of soil regeneration and manure, composting and things along those lines. Yeah. No, I think it's interesting, and we're in an interesting time for sure. It'll be interesting to see where they get with that and everything else with that. And, you know, you brought up an interesting point, too, not to keep going down the rabbit hole, but the other thing that I thought really interesting was when you look at waste components.

I feel like we're not maybe looking at that as much as we should be when we're talking about trying to feed a bunch of people. It's like, well, maybe we should start with what we're throwing away that we wouldn't have to. Oh, yeah. And I think, like, at first, I just thought, like, well, you know, there's a lot of food thrown away at restaurants. There's a lot of stuff that's thrown away just because it doesn't meet standards for, like, the grocery store. It's like, let's start there. And I actually had asked Dr. Schindler about that. He actually did a study with some of his grad students where they looked at, I think they

took 30 white tail deer and they processed it down to like the very last potential calorie to find out how much is wasted, even in like a, you know, a deer that say you go and you shoot a deer and then you take it to the process and get it all done. He said it was between, I think it was between like 13 to 30 days worth of human nutrition that gets wasted in a single white-tailed deer.

Whoa. So like- Well, here's the problem with that idea. A waste is only if you do something with it. If you leave it in the field, there's no waste. Right. Like if you just killed a deer, it's not, leave it in the field, there's no waste. Right. Like if you just killed a deer, it just left it there. There's no waste.

You're feeding animals. Right, that's true. I mean, they're going to absolutely destroy that thing. It's going to be gone in a short period of time, including the bones. They'll eat the bones. And if they don't eat the bones, the bones will eventually deteriorate and become part of the soil. This is what happens when animals die.

Sure. So I guess maybe the way to look at then is like what are we if we're looking to just if our objective is to feed as many people as possible and we're maximizing the amount of nutrients we can acquire from a specific thing like we're leaving a lot on the table or we're giving a lot to different areas like different animals and things that are well we're doing it wrong you know we're putting our waste in bags and we're throwing it into the groundfills, I mean landfills. Have you seen they did this aerial study of Los Angeles? They're trying to find out where most of the methane comes from.

They were trying to figure out. It's fucking landfills, man. Landfills are disgusting. And this is not how it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be animals are supposed to have access to what's left over. I mean, this is what would happen if a bear killed a moose, right? If a bear killed a moose, it's going to consume a big portion of the body, and then it's going to leave whatever's left, and then rodents and vultures and then eventually insects and

bacteria are going to break it down. And this is a natural cycle of life for animals. This is how it's supposed to be what we do is we take it we cut it up we eat some of it we throw some of it away we put that in a plastic bag we zip tie it we dig a fucking hole in the ground and we throw that bag in there it's not it's ludicrous yeah it's we know better we do know better we understand the whole process of these things breaking down in the wild and what happens to them we understand that there's animals that their entire diet consists of eating animals that other animals have killed and they leave some of it

behind that's we're supposed to leave it behind it's supposed to be a part of the whole cycle of life we were supposed to compost all these things are supposed to be natural behind. It's supposed to be a part of the whole cycle of life. We are supposed to compost. All these things are supposed to be natural. When I was a kid, my mom and my stepdad were part of this cooperative farm thing. And we started composting. And we didn't do it for very long because we eventually wound up moving and we stopped being a part of this thing. But I thought it was really interesting because I was a little kid. I was like, oh, I never thought of that before.

You take your food waste and you separate it from like paper. You give your paper waste and then you have like leftover tomatoes or something like that. And all that would go into one specific bin. And that bin would go into this big thing. It was made with like chicken wire and leaves and you had a lid over it. thing. It was made with chicken wire and leaves and you had a lid over it and it was a wood box and you would throw everything in there and it would all sort of rot and compost

and then you would take that stuff and you would use it in the garden. And this is how composting is done. This is how fertilizer is made and this is what you're supposed to do. This is like small scale regenerative farming. and what we're doing as assholes we take our food we put in fucking bags we zip tie it shut and we chuck it in the ground it's dumb it's a really dumb way of doing things i just feel like that is something that we could really leverage at the educational

level like you know we've got schools where where we were housing these kids and like, you know, one of the biggest hurdles I think is like, we got them indoors sitting in desks for seven, eight hours a day. And then we, what, why not get them out and learn that and do that?

And we have these mini little like regenerative areas. Sure. Then you learn it and then it doesn't get forgotten when you're an adult as easily. Well, we're so enamored with this idea of working, you Well, we're so enamored with this idea of working. We're so enamored with this idea of getting a job. We're so enamored with this idea of the structure of civilization

as it stands in 2019 is the way to go. So we're teaching kids how to complete this life that they're born into, the way it's established for their parents, the way it's established for their neighborhood. Get in your car, drive to work, work all day, come home, eat what you can, throw the rest of the garbage, go back to work in the morning. And this is nonsense. This is not how you have to do it.

You don't have to do anything. There's a bunch of different ways to live this life. And there's only 100 years if you're lucky. So this thing that we're setting up, we're setting up kids to essentially be as miserable as everybody else before them doing the exact same thing that everybody else has done like maybe you can get lucky like i have been or like you've been and you find something that you actually enjoy doing then you get lucky like oh my god you know zach found a job that he really loves and he got really good at it and now he actually has joy in what he does but there's there's a lot of different places in this this country alone where you can live

and you could do things in a in a non-traditional manner and you can get by and you'll probably be healthier and happier than someone that gets stuck in the same goddamn civilization cycle, this industrialized cycle that we're all in. And we don't teach kids that. What we teach kids is here's history, here's math, get your SATs in, get the score, go to the college that you want, get a job. And this is the standard path that seems to be rewarded. And if you say, well, I'm going to drop out and find myself,

oh, good luck, loser. You're going to fuck up your life you know what are you doing man you're not even going to college jesus christ like and it's very unfortunate that we have this incredibly rigid system and um and it really makes people feel like it made me feel like a failure i didn't fit into the system i just because of i have add or whatever emotional issues whatever i had i just could not sit still in class and concentrate i had way too much fucking energy this is just this was just not for me i was twiddling my thumbs and tapping the floor and looking at the clock and three o'clock yeah when that fucking thing hit i was gone and i didn't want to do home i literally didn't do any homework my entire high

school career i didn't do any i just got by being smart enough to pass tests by learning what i learned in class and not putting in any fucking extra effort i just wanted to get out and i found something that i was good at i figured it out i found i got lucky that i did that but for a lot of people they just live these lives of frustration you you know, and they never do find a thing. And they're not taught to find a thing. And there's also, I think there's a great satisfaction to working on something that you enjoy, whether it's working with your hands or working on something that's creative, and working with the land. You know, you talk to people that run their own little organic farms like i know this couple that runs an organic farm and man when they talk about their

their food they talk about the vegetables they grow and the stuff they grow they like beam they're excited about it they're excited it's a natural there's there's a there's natural there's a gravity that we have towards that it's a natural human reward to be able to cultivate your own food if you can make a salad out of some stuff that you grew yourself man that feels amazing it really does and there's people that could be making a living doing that they're never encouraged to do so and they might be way happier than selling insurance yeah yeah no i agree and you could feed other people too man i mean that's the other thing like if you could figure out a way

to run an organic garden and you do compost you don't use pesticides you do everything organic and everything is regenerative and you actually can feed people my god like how good would you feel pretty satisfying yes yeah i would think i would think really satisfying it's not for everybody but it's got to be for somebody. And they're not being – no one's teaching you that in school. You have to be one of those outside-the-box thinkers because school is essentially set up for scale. It's set up for you've got 500 kids. You've got to turn them into not losers.

How do I get 500 kids to not be a loser? Well, just standard path, like standard american education these like standard paths that will work for x amount of people you get 10 people seven of them won't be losers if you just shove them into this machine and pump them out in this fucking form yeah it's a bummer uh-huh we're not here we're getting education advice from the ultra marathon runner yeah but you're a good guy to get education advice from. Well, I was a teacher for five years, so. But it's also you're a successful guy at an unusual thing. You know, you found a thing that you really excel at that you actually enjoy.

Yeah. And that is, for so many people, the ultimate goal of life. Like, you can make a lot of money in this life but you will not be as happy and it's really contrary to like capitalist ideas like we were taught to think that the more money you make the happier you'll be that's definitely not true but you will make more money if you're happier with what you do which sounds like a contradiction but it's not you'll excel and if And if you're excelling, whatever you're doing is profitable. Obviously, there's some things that you can excel at that are just, there's no fucking way to make a lot of money as a bowler.

If you're like, I'm really into bowling. Well, you're kind of fucked because it's just one of those things that nobody gives a shit about. Better find something else you're interested in too. Yeah, it would be nice if you found something that actually paid the bills. But if you can find something that you enjoy, you'll have an infinitely happier life. It's just you can do that. You just have to find those.

You have to explore those things. And I think that's where we fail kids. We fail kids in giving them this landscape of possibilities that actually does exist. I think there's a landscape of possibilities for what you can do. And everyone different i don't want to be an ultra marathon runner man right if you and i were competing i'm fucked okay i'm not going to win i'm not going to excel i'm built like a chimp i'm not i'm not the guy that's supposed to be running 200 miles it's just your realm and it's also it's not what i don't desire to do that conversely if you had to become a stand-up comedian you'd probably be like well fuck this i don't want to do that. Conversely, if you had to become a stand-up comedian, you'd probably be like, well, fuck this.

I don't want to do any thinking about things that's funny. And the first time you bomb, you're like, what am I doing with my life? Everybody has a different personality and these different personalities and these different interests and desires. They take different paths. I think we need to open that up to people more and just sort of in some way encourage people to seek more, to seek, to genuinely try to find the things that interest you. Maybe you should be a fly fishing guide. You know, maybe you should be a guy who makes homemade mugs out of exotic hardwood. You know, maybe, you know, maybe you're a knife maker. Maybe you're a person who

maybe you should make fucking dream catchers i don't know don't make dream catchers does anybody really like dream catchers those like something you buy and then you put it on the wall and you go what the fuck am i doing why did i do that i'm like pretending i'm a native american or something but there's things you can do man you just have to find that thing and i think that's so hard for people and that's why people when they find someone like yourself that's doing this unusual, unorthodox thing and you're extremely successful at it, it becomes so attractive to people to hear your story. Yeah. And I think it's – I would have never guessed I'd be doing what I'm doing now 10 years ago. So it's equally surprising to me, I think sometimes, but, uh, it, you know, it,

it is, uh, it is interesting when you think about just where you thought you would maybe be and then where you end up and all that stuff in between. And ultimately, I think if you, I think you want to be, be smart about stuff. Like I didn't necessarily just quit my job and say, I'm going to be an ultra marathon runner. You kind of have like a few different options available, or you just keep options open to like, uh, for me personally, I like to coach too. So I'm going to do some of that and that helps supplement things. And then, you know, podcasting has always been a fun thing to do. So historically I'd always go on podcasts. And then a couple of years ago, it was like, well, if it's this much fun to go on them, it must be fun to do them too so you know starting these other i think

when people start kind of really exploring where their curiosities are you find these different avenues too and it just kind of snowballs a little bit as opposed to being you know maybe you start out making the dream catcher and then you become something else right right you just get really in the feathers yeah did you ever um think about doing something like do you get revelations post-training do you because one of the things that i always have after like really good hard workouts first of all i'm always feel filled with gratitude i'm always like really thankful after long hard workouts and i've thought about doing this thing called the gratitude series where um i do a podcast like immediately after like really hard workouts nice and just

talk about my feelings and i mean it sounds fucking corny and self-indulgent but but realistically i think there's some lessons that i learn off of really hard workouts you know where it's like at the end of it you know when it's all done first of all there's always this feeling like eight out of ten times i don't want to work out. Really, eight out of ten. I work out ten out of ten. But eight out of ten, I'm like, fuck this. But you're always happy.

Always. Always. And that's the hump, man. Yeah. That fucking hump of just shut that part of your brain up and just start moving. And then once you start moving, you start breaking a sweat. Once you start breaking a sweat once you start breaking a sweat it becomes easier it starts feeling good then you start getting some satisfaction like oh i almost didn't do this today here i am doing it and you know and then sometimes it's fucking you know sometimes i'm looking at a three mile run which is nothing for

you but uh a mile in i'm like fuck two more go. Jesus Christ. And I'm running hills and shit. But when it's over, it's like, yes, I did it. You know, and I get back to the car and I'm saying hi to people. Hey, what's up? How you doing? Waving to the neighbors. Dog's exhausted. I'm happy.

Everybody's pumped. You know, it's like, and I feel good. I feel warm. I feel friendly. I feel loving. I feel, you know, i want to call people and tell them i care about them it's like it's like there's moments like post-workout in particular where you just feel really good and i think life is sometimes about getting over those periods of feeling kind

of shitty or low energy or lethargic or unrested or whatever the fuck it is and just pushing through that because you know the territory you've been there before and then developing a habit of being able to do that and being able to know and have faith in the process and understand that this yeah yeah yeah i know you don't want to do it shut the fuck up and go just go and then once you do go you always feel better. Yeah, no, I a hundred percent agree. And I think in my own training, like I get that from a lot of different workouts. Uh, but the, the one that I really love is like when I get closer to a race and I like what I was saying before you start dialing things in to be more specific to the,

to the activity you're trying to prepare for, I'll do a phase of training where I'm running kind of in an area of about like 150 to 155 beats per minute. So I can go like on a, it's, it's just fast enough where I feel like I'm really kind of like working, but it's also slow enough where I can go for quite a while. So I can like log a really big run. And, uh, when I was training for this last race, uh, that at the Pettit center, I had a training cycle where I hit, I had a four-week block where I had one deload week, which is just basically a reduction of volume and intensity and three build-ups.

Why is it called deload? Because I'm like reducing volume and intensity. And the other three though were build-up ones. So I had like 130 mile a week, right around 130 and then 250 mile weeks. And they were just like basically loaded with like kind of just faster than or right about kind of 100 mile weeks. And they were just like basically loaded with like kind of just faster than, or right about kind of a hundred mile intensity. So, you know, I would do, and you can maybe pull it up. I think I have a picture on my Instagram page of the, I did these key workouts where I'd go to a track and I would just do loops around the track. And it'd be like anywhere between 27

to like 32 miles at that kind of intensity. And you just get into like a flow and a rhythm. And it just, once you kind of get moving, it feels great. And afterwards, yeah, you feel great the whole rest of the day and you just want to kind of go out and do it again. You almost have to be careful not to do too much at a certain point. Who structures those? Do you structure them yourself? Yeah. Yeah. To kind of go back to what we were talking about in the beginning, like when I structure a plan, ideally I start out, I start out with a good base, a good aerobic base, which I typically kind of retain almost year round. Um, I'll take like off season, but I like to follow a principle where I'll let myself kind of lose some of that peak fitness, just so it's sustainable because staying at your peak fitness level is not sustainable.

Uh, so I let myself get like just out of shape enough so that I'm not always at that level. Uh, and then, uh, I, I start kind of building in the, the structure towards the race itself, which starts with those shorter, faster intervals since they're further away. And then I get closer and closer to the race where I'm doing things that are more specific. So like the next step would be, I'd be doing some longer intervals or kind of like what you consider like an anaerobic threshold type workout, which generally speaking is about like your max intensity if you did like a 60-minute all-out time trial.

And then, you know, that's still not specific to 100 miles because I'm out there for 11 hours. So I'm kind of still moving closer to that slower race pace. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it just follows the principle of, you know, hitting all the systems of training like you would in any other periodized endurance plan, but always keeping that compass of the stuff you do for the intensity of the race itself is the type of work you should be doing closest to it. So you're really just optimizing when you're closer to the race itself. How do you know what your peak fitness is? Like when you say that you want to, you can't really maintain the peak

fitness. You want to back off a little bit so that you can just keep your, your training running. How do you know where that is and how do you know that you cannot expand that? And then. Yeah, no, that's a great question. That's somewhat subjective too. Uh, I mean, you can analyze things if you want to go into like heart rate variability type things. Uh, if, um, but that's a little bit more on the micro level for me personally, like usually I'll get to a point where like I'll do a race and you can just kind of tell like I'm exhausted from that. And I like to think of it kind of twofolded

where like physical recovery and mental recovery. So if I do a big race and afterwards, like I can't even like bring myself to think of another big training block. I know I need to like let myself to think of another big training block i know i'm i need to like let myself kind of get a little bit out of that fitness state that peak fitness state and just kind of reset or hit the reset button so this is just from years and years of training and you make mistakes i mean in the past uh you know a lot of times i'll do one i'll be like i

think i got one more race left for me and then then it goes badly. So, oh, right, right. Now what is a long day? Like say if you're getting prepared for this 100 mile race and you know, you're going to have to run for 11 plus hours. What's a long day for you? Yeah. So the longest run I did for this particular one was three and a half hours. It was, I think 32 miles or something, somewhere in that neighborhood. Uh, I'll do, I'll do, I usually don't push up much past five hours in my own training uh if i'm gonna do much more than that i'll just jump in a race uh like the nice thing about phoenix is there's a race company called aerovipa and they put on like 30 some ultra events every year so it's like wow you can basically almost every weekend pretty

much yeah that's crazy so like the the guy who raced direct at jamil he he'll he'll let me jump in events when i want to and uh so sometimes i'll if i'm gonna do something like say i want to i'm preparing for 100 mile and i want to get a really long day like a seven eight hour session in you know he i'll just pick like a like a 100k type event or like you know 50 miler type event and just do that at like i like like to say like, I try and those are, you know, those are training tools. So I don't want to necessarily race it all out. Uh, but if you can kind of keep yourself at like maybe 80% of what you're capable of, you can get that good long stimulus, but not necessarily beat yourself up so much that it takes away from the race you're

preparing for. And so 50 miles would take you or how long would that take you? It depends on the course. Like I just did a 50 miler actually, uh actually about a week and a half ago called the JFK 50 mile. And that took me five hours and 42 minutes. And that course is kind of, it's got, you go over the Appalachian mountains for about 60 miles and you get on a really flat tow path for about a marathon and then some rolling street hills. So that's not as fast as you can find. You can find, I mean, you can go on a track. How much elevation are you going up and down that one was about 3 000 feet so it is but the funny thing about ultra marathon especially in

north america is like you know the trails are where a lot of you know there's a lot of interest there so 3 000 for 50 is actually considered a relatively flat fast course whoa um you know it's hilarious it's really interesting too because like like some of the, I live just about two hours south of Flagstaff. And I mean, there's a group of ultra marathon guys who train up there. And they, I got a lot of inspiration from two of them specifically for this last race, the race at the Pettit Center. One guy's name is Jim Walmsley. And he's, for my money, probably the best ultra marathoner we have, certainly in North America, if not the world. I mean, he's got the course record at the Western States 100, which is the most tested 100 miler in North America.

He's got the course record at the Lake Sonoma 50 mile by a pretty big margin. He's actually got the two fastest times, but the next closest person to him is like 18 minutes behind or something like that. And then he's also got the course record at the JFK 50 mile, the one I just was mentioning before. And these three events are three of the most tested courses that we've had. And he's got the course records at all of them and he can probably go faster on all three. So, I mean, some of his training is like, he'll do like 150 mile a week sometimes with like 30,000 feet of climbing and descending. is like, he'll do like 150 mile a week sometimes with like 30,000 feet of climbing and descending.

And the kicker is, uh, one of his training partners, Jared Hazen. So if Jim is the best ultra runner North America has from the male side, Jared Hazen is by far the most underrated. So this guy, uh, he ran the Western States 100 this year. Jim finished first, Jared finished second. Jim broke his course record by running 14 hours and nine minutes on a course that has 17 000 feet of climbing and 23 000 feet of descent he ran 100 miles with that much yeah in 14 hours in western yeah in western states it's considered a running course for the most part too like there's crazier ones that get way worse from a climbing and descending like moab yeah We have to use trekking stairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Jared, though, Jared – so Jim, he had actually broken the course record the year before. And he took like – I think it was like 16 or 17 minutes off the old course record, ran 14 and a half hours. This next year, he broke his course record with the 14.09. Next year, he broke his course record with the 14.09. Jared came in second in, I think it was 14.23 or 14.26, just behind Jim, basically pushing him all day. So any other time, Jared would have won that race, except for that year. And it would have been a huge story for him. And it was an amazing performance from those two guys. and just watching kind of their training and then their performances because i was out there crewing and pacing my wife

uh it was like a huge motivator for me when i kind of got into the training build up for that race at the pennant center so wow it's it's it's it's just funny with ultra marathoning because you have such a variety like i think we talked about this a bit the last time i was on you can have like these 50k races that are like i mean there's 50k races that have 10,000 feet of climbing and descending And then you can have these 6 day events That are on a 400 meter track Right Which is much different

You are doing something really bonkers right now You're attempting to run Across the entire country To break the record Yeah so this is kind of in its infancy a bit from the planning stages uh so it probably won't happen in the immediate future but uh um someone you're very familiar with actually justin wren yeah he's got the fight for the gun i was actually on the phone with him last night and uh one thing i've kind of been interested in since i started ultra

running is this route it's a 3100 mile route basically it goes from san francisco to new york running is this route. It's a 3,100 mile route, basically it goes from San Francisco to New York. And it's been done by, you know, quite a few people both walking, running, um, Pete Koselnik, he's got the course record. I know he averaged like 70 miles a day. Um, yeah, yeah. So it's like, it's, it's a pretty insane route. Uh, and I've always been interested in doing it and I just haven't really been motivatedivated I guess To really attempt it Or I guess I just really didn't know when I would do it I just had an idea I would And then last year

One of my sponsors The F-bomb, those nut butter sachets I love those But my friend RZA And John L. Rawlings They believe that the name should be changed They believe nut butter has a negative connotation to heterosexual males who think that it sounds like something comes out of your dick. Any thoughts?

A name change would maybe be good. Well, I guess in their defense, theirs is called F-bomb, not nut butter, right? Right. But in general. F-bomb is better, right? It's a better name. Yeah, yeah. It's good stuff.

I love their stuff. Yeah, no, they make a great product. And they had actually proposed last year. I think they just were maybe spitballing a little bit. But they were like, hey, would you be ever interested in doing that? Like go running, doing that cross-country route. And I was like, yeah, I've been actually wanting to do that at some point. I just haven't gotten around to actually planning it out.

How funny is that as a statement? Yeah, I've been wanting to run run 3100 miles across the fucking continent and try to beat the record which averaged 60 to 70 miles a day god damn dude how would you prepare for that uh yeah you know i mean i'd be in super uncharted territory because i've just haven't done anything like that before so it would be difficult you'd be a lot aarted territory because I've just haven't done anything like that before. So it would be difficult. You'd be a lot of learning on the fly. I think really the big key thing there is you're managing a lot of stuff with that. Like you want to make sure you're sleeping well throughout that because obviously if you're not sleeping well, it could end badly for you pretty soon.

So then I think you just end up trying to do as much specific things as you can to prepare without going overboard. So just a lot of time on feet. I mean, you can imagine the pace is going to be incredibly slow. There's probably gonna be like walking breaks. I'm not going to be like, you know, certainly not gonna be running six 48 per mile pace. But my, my, my first thought is like, I'll probably target like a 12 to 14 hour range per day. And, uh, whatever I get out of that 12 to 14 days or hours is what I get. And then that gives me kind of the flexibility to have like at least 10 hours of buffer to kind of like prep and sleep and get ready for the next day. Do you know Eddie as it is? Yeah.

Are you aware of what he did? He ran the entire length of the UK on the outside of it. With no training, right? He's an animal, man. He really is a special person. Really is a special person really is a special person i remember um only knowing of him as a comedian um and you know had seen him do a lot of stand-up before and then i watched this documentary where he's running i mean how many miles how many different marathons was it was like 26 27 and 27 days 27 marathons 27 days he did wind up taking one day off or his feet were literally mangled from blisters i can only imagine he wasn't in shape

which is just fucking crazy just sheer willpower i mean just to do one marathon when you're not in shape i just can't imagine the the just the fucking sheer amount of just will, just pure will that it takes to do something like that and to just keep pushing left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, even though everything, your head, your brain, your feet, everything, stop, stop, stop, fuck you, left, right, left, right, left, right. I mean, he ran, how many thousand miles was it? The entire length of the UK, all over the outside edge.

He did another one, too, though. He did 43 marathons. Oh, Christ. He did one in South Africa, right? 43 in 51 days was his first one, and then 27 in 27 days was his second one. 43? 43 fucking marathons? The article in 2009,

comedian Elliot was celebrating after finishing his 43rd marathon in 51 days. He's a really, really interesting guy. Yeah, it's amazing what he can do. He's Eddie Izzard, but he's a cross-dresser. So he's like, he comes out as transgender, I think, but not really, because he likes women, and he likes women as a man. He just likes dressing as a woman. He's just a really unique guy, but he owns it.

You know what I'm saying? He is who he is. Sub five-hour marathon. The connection is aimed at finishing on the sub five-hour marathon. Misses target by 30 seconds. Give it to him. Yeah, let's round down in that case. 30 seconds. Give it to him. Yeah. Let's round down in that case.

Jesus Christ. Give him an honorary 459. Such a fucking interesting, interesting, thoughtful, intelligent person. Really enjoyed talking to him. But when he's talking about these marathons, you're like, good Lord, man. It's hard enough for someone to do who's like you. Like for a guy like you to run 40 what? How many marathons?

40 what? What are you saying? A lot. A lot. Let's say 40. Fuck it. For you to run 40 marathons in 40 days is fucking bonkers, right? Yeah, that'd be a bigger training block than I've ever done for sure.

That's crazy. And you're a fucking world record holder. You got a goddamn stand-up comedian out there running. Yeah. It's amazing what people can do when they decide they're going to do it yes like uh yes uh but yeah i mean i think with for for this particular run you know i probably would have kept punting it down the road and you know had i not talked to justin wren to be honest with you like uh you know when you do something like that like part of the reason I think you do that is, uh, for me anyway, is when I see like endurance, ultra endurance sports, it can be a very selfish sport because you're, you know, you're putting in tons of training.

Race day is like an all day effort with tons of people helping you out. Like they're taking time out of their schedule, their day to come out there, crew pace, essentially like be your, your support system while you're out there kind of trying to you know do all these things so uh you know part of it is like i want to try to give back in a in a in a way as well uh as opposed to just always going out and racing for my own my own sake and what will be done how will it will you have sponsors like yeah i'm gonna do it hopefully what we'll do is i was talking to just we sponsor you? Absolutely. Really?

Beautiful. We wear like a JRE logo on one of your shirts or something? No doubt about it. Fuck yeah. All right, we're in. Let's do it. Awesome. We got one sponsor on board.

Here we go. Yeah, hell yeah. But yeah, so when I talked to Justin, I mean, you know Justin while he's been on the show. I love that guy. And I think it was on here that I heard his podcast for the first time. I know I heard him tell, I guess, what you would call his origin story here. And I think I heard it again on like the Mind Pump Media Guys podcast. And it's – when I describe just listening to Justin Wren's podcast or his interviews to people, I try to say like, well, it kind of comes in these stages where he tells his background story of like his experience with bullying. And at first, you just – your heart just sinks for the guy. You're thinking like,

well, how could anyone have to go through that? I would never want him to go through that. And then you kind of transition into this phase of like, you kind of get nervous and anxious because you're thinking like, well, who did I say something mean to when I was younger? Or who did I, who did I potentially affect in a negative way? And then it's like, then you just want to try to do something to support. And, you know, it's really, when you look at someone like Justin Wren,

it's mind boggling to me that this guy isn't like an internationally known hero or leader yet anyway. Well, he's becoming that. He's getting big. He really is. He's getting big.

The only thing that's holding him back is he keeps getting sick yeah he's well and that's just fucking crazy you know he's parasites he's right now they don't even know what they are yeah he picked up some parasites in the congo they can't even identify them specifically uh-huh and it's he's really suffering health-wise and you would never know talking to him like he just goes about it like the guy's gotten malaria like most people would probably say okay i went over to africa i got malaria i helped some people out i'm good i'm good now now someone we'll raise some money for this charity and we'll send it over to him or something like that no he keeps going back and keeps getting malaria three times so yeah yeah three times and now he's got the unknown parasite so like when i think of like what we i think maybe

like i mean justin wren is like next level when it comes to, like, a leader, I think. And I think in the current, especially in the current climate, like, you know, our leaders today tend to be, you know, some of like, how badly are people actually trying to help people? And how many of these politicians actually care about poor people? How many of them actually care about someone who's disenfranchised? Or how many of them actually care about- Why are they doing it? Are they doing it to just get elected? Or do they actually care?

Well, Justin, it's just care. Yes. It's all care. There's no worry at all about ulterior motives. They don't exist. There's no ulterior motive to sleep on a dirt floor in a grass shack with the pygmies like he's done for months at a time. He's just doing it for love.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think like when I look at like, I think people want to help and I think people want to do things that are good for humanity, but oftentimes they don't necessarily have that example to kind of like to lead the way. And they look into a void in some cases. And I think Justin is the type of person who, you know, if the more people we can get to know about him, his story and what he's trying to do on the wells and the farms and with the pygmy, as well as his new branch on anti-bullying, the better. So when I reached out to him, I was actually like kind of surprised. Like I shot him a note on, I think, Instagram and Twitter. And I thought like, he's probably not going to see it because he's not following me. And he responded in like less than a couple hours. Like he followed me, responded back. And he like this is so awesome i feel super honored that you'd want to you know help out in

some way and it's like he's just always looking for opportunities to help like promote this great cause so then you know when i got that response from him it was like clarification of what i think i some i already knew about the guy just from listening to him on your show and others like you know he's really in this for a big reason and. And if we need to fast track this cross-country event to bring him some awareness, we'll see what we can do. He's in everything he does. He does to help and promote other people. Even when I was trying to talk to him about his parasite, I had to keep getting him on track.

He's like, you got to interview my doctor. No, no, no, fuck your doctor. What's going on, man? What's happening with you? Because I worry about the guy because he's so selfless. You got to interview my doctor. No, no, no. Fuck your doctor. What's going on, man? What's happening with you? Because I worry about the guy because he's so selfless. When he's talking about blacking out and all this after training, they got to get him in the shower because he's shivering and he's pale white. I'm like, bro, what is going on with you?

What is this? And he's like, oh, you got to meet my doctor. He's amazing. I'm like, stop. Stop with the fucking doctor. I don't want to get... What is happening? He doesn't want to meet my doctor. He's amazing. Like, stop. Stop with the fucking doctor. I don't want to get – what is happening? He doesn't want to talk about himself. It's amazing.

He's the most selfless person I've ever talked to. He's talking about fighting again, right? He's getting over these incredible bouts of antibiotics that you know weaken your ligaments, right? Like when you take Cipro or any of these like super intense antibiotics, one of the side effects is a lot of times people get injured, like your ligaments get injured because apparently there's a weakening effect, which is really kind of, it's really fascinating when you think about the human body as an overall

organism and that it's really an ecosystem and that when you flood antibiotics into that ecosystem to try to prevent disease from destroying it you also have these unintended side effects and one of them is weakened ligaments and there's a lot of it's a correlation between people getting staph infection and then blowing out knees acls you know tendons and things along those lines afterwards so he both of his shoulders are fucked you know and this is post antibiotics and yet he's still talking about fighting so he can bring more awareness to the pygmy so i'm like bro please stop just get your shoulders fixed yeah whatever you got going on let's let's heal that up first and then also find out what the

fuck this parasite is like you don't even know what this didn't even know this is he's not even thinking about himself he's like if i can get in and get a fight in by the end of the year like the end of the year man it's fucking december like stop it you're not getting in by the end of the year you're not getting in the beginning of 2020 let's heal up heal up we gotta we want you healthy yeah he's such a rare totally selfless person and he's so such a powerful force for good for those peoples uh the people that live in in the congo and what he's done for them i mean i i don't know how many wells they've built so far but they've made an alliance with the cash app which is one of my sponsors so every time someone downloads the

cash app when they use the code joe rogan whether it's for Google, for Android, or for an iPhone, for Apple, you get $10 goes to this cause. So they've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they're building wells right now. It's just this amazing thing that he's done. And he's just – like you feel like a piece of shit. Like when you're around him, you're like, why am I not this nice? He's so nice. It's like it wasn't enough for him to find people who are hard off. He had to go and find the most forgotten, most hard off people on the planet.

Yes, right. It's like so many people in Africa have it rough. No, no, no. Who's got the roughest? The tiny folks that live. And on top of that, the guy's a world-class mixed martial artist. I mean, he really is. He's one of the best heavyweights in the world.

And how much better would he be if he was selfish and spent all of his time training and not getting malaria three times, not having this unknown parasite that they think might be in his fucking brain? I mean, they don't even know what it's – I was just reading this story about some guy who was having seizures, and it turns out he had all these worms in his brain. And I'm like – and I was thinking about Justin. It was from uncooked pork from this guy. And Justin – they think – the problem with the Congo is it's so remote, and you don't get a lot of people that go there and get diseases and then come back. So they might not – they don't even know what this is. It there and get diseases and then come back. So they might not, they don't even know what this is. It might be something that no one's ever got before and then made it back to

Western civilization to be examined. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. What the hell, man? Yeah.

And you would never know talking to him. No, he just doesn't want to talk about it. Yeah. Let's talk about his friend. Hey, you got to get my friend on the podcast. He's really sweet.

He's a great guy. He makes kites like what what the fuck you're talking about each kite is going to generate x amount of dollars from the bottle up justin ren and feed it to everyone i guess well you know it's an interesting i'm not just an interesting it's a it's a a beautiful sort of expression of what can happen to a person when they experience deep pain and sadness and then they find a way out and then they find a way to help other people and that's sort of what he's done you know his his childhood was really rough and he came out of that a super kind person as opposed to being angry and mean i, this is what we need more in the world, right? We need more people building people up and helping and less people tearing people down and hating.

I mean, so much of what social media is used for and so much of what the internet is used for is hate, is anger. There's so much anger. And to see someone like Justin, this rare soul that has found a way to almost universe. I mean, like everything he does is channeled towards good. All of it, you know, including kicking people's asses, which is like, how do you make that good? He found it. He found a way to make kicking people's asses a good thing. It's beautiful. I'm really honored to be his friend. So he's one of my, you know, the rarest people that I know. Yeah, no doubt. No, it's been cool to hear his story. And, you know, I think thanks to you, he's probably got a much bigger audience too.

So what are you thinking about in terms of the timeline? Well, so if I go and try to get close to or right around the record for that, it's about a 40-day-ish timeframe, give or take. So you're really, I think the biggest hurdle or planning thing is to find the timeline where you're going to run into at least a lot of weather issues. Because you're going across the country, so you're going over the Sierras and you're going through the middle of the country and then all that stuff. So you're going over the Sierras and you're going through the middle of the country and then all that stuff. So obviously you don't want to be going over mountain passes in the middle of winter, but you probably don't also want to be going through the Midwest in the middle of the summer. So some of it's going to be kind of planning around that. There's probably some good opportunities in the spring and the fall that kind of catch that window of moderate temps versus extremes.

What's the gentleman that did it before? Pete Kostelik. Do you know pete yeah yeah there he is man runs from san francisco to new york in record time look at that guy he's still dazed pete's also like what the fuck did i do you want to hear something crazy about pete though so he did that and then uh that wasn't enough because he i think this was a year ago or two years ago he went up in alaska and went from Alaska down to the southern tip of Florida all by himself with just one of those push strollers. And he averaged, I think it was like 50 miles a day or something like that.

What? So, yeah, folks. He went from Alaska to Florida. Yeah, yeah. He did a, I forget what they called it. Well, a stroller. So that's his food? His food's in the stroller?

Yeah. What the fuck, bro? You know, it was funny. I was kind of following him while he did it. That's so crazy. He's got a baby stroller with food in it. What a crazy idea. He did, when I was following him, like, you know, he was logging all his runs on Strava.

So it was hilarious to see, like, these weeks after weeks where it's like 50-mile day, 50-mile day, 50-mile day, like, you know, like 350, 400 mile weeks and stuff like that. And then if you like zoomed in on his routes, you could see like, he'd be on this route and all of a sudden you see him deviate a little bit and you'd zoom in and you'd be like, oh, there's a grocery store there. That's why he turned right there. To fill up his baby cart with food. Where did he keep his money? I don't know.

The baby cart? Probably, yeah. Someone tried to steal that baby cart. Where did he sleep? I think he stayed at hotels, if I'm not mistaken. Okay. I'd have to look back in the story. To bring the baby cart up the stairs?

Yeah. Jesus Christ. There's crazy people out there, man. There's different kind of humans, right? You have this idea of what a person is capable of, and you see someone like that, and you go, okay. I got to rethink this. People are capable of way more yeah you know yeah it's it's nuts when you think about as soon as you think you find limitations then all of a sudden someone goes out and does does something crazier or bigger or better and guy took a baby stroller from alaska to florida what the fuck man um did you talk to him at all about this idea I haven't yet no I mean

it's been are you going to yeah I'll definitely reach out to him he'll he'll be good about it I think yeah he's a nice guy I know Pete so how many people have done this run I you know I don't even know it's been it's a documented route so uh it's been done done you could probably google it and find out and uh but yeah it's it yeah, it's more than you'd think. It just really usually comes down. And actually, you know, Justin worked with someone earlier who did it walking. I think it maybe was a slightly different route, but it was basically the same premise. And he walked like 20-some miles a day or something like that and was raising funds and awareness for Fight for the Forgotten, too.

So we'll maybe talk to him a bit, too. So the idea is late summer, early fall, something like that? Yeah, that's probably ideal. I think you want to try to catch – you want to get away from winter, but you also want to be done before the worst part of summer. Right. With the global warming, do you factor that in? Depends how fast fast ends up coming

the route might be shorter by the time i get around to doing it if the coasts come in though so sometime around this time next year it should be completed is that the idea um maybe my thought is it's probably got to either be about like, you know, a 10 month, like start point or 18. So I could either do it now, or I guess it'd be a little less than 18, but by finishing. So I would either maybe try to do it like this fall, or if I don't have enough in place by then target kind of the end of winter for 2021. And what would change? What would make you decide to do it 2021 versus 2020? Just, I mean, I'm trying to respect how much like planning it's going to take. And I haven't really started that yet. So I don't want to like necessarily get, find out like, okay, let's say I just put a date on the calendar right away and then find out, oh, I need to like, and there's a lot more resources I have to try to acquire to make this happen.

And this is in terms of logistics, like food, shelter. Yeah, mostly logistics and getting everything just organized enough to, because I don't want to screw it up. Yeah. So there's that too. And then also planning around my own race schedule to a degree too. So obviously this will probably, this will take the place of an, the way I look at uh like seasons of

racing is there's kind of two key ones you have like your spring early summer and your kind of late summer fall slash winter season so there's kind of two uh so i'll basically just sacrifice one of those seasons for this and i probably won't i mean i don't really know what to expect because i've never done anything quite like this before, but I'm planning on dedicating one of those seasons towards that exclusively. Jamie's nodding over here. He's got something. I was digging through this article. It's pretty interesting.

So it started here. Distance walking was a huge spectator sport in the late 19th century. They would bet money that, like, you couldn't do it. That's how everything starts. Look at this quote. People followed it like it was the world series so it continued on until the great depression world war ii probably because people didn't have enough time to waste their time doing this and then it picked back up in the late

20th century and that's when you had to prove what you were doing look at this the first known transcontinental journey took place in 1896 by a mother-daughter duo who, needing to raise money to save their farm in Spokane County, Washington, responded to a $10,000 public wager that no one could make it by foot across the country. Helga and Clara Espy left home with $10 between them, as well as a compass, a knife, a curling iron, and a Smith & Wesson revolver. Don't fuck with those ladies. They'll curl your hair and shoot you in the dick. They made it to New York City seven months later, but for reasons unknown, did not receive any reward for their toils. On their way home, Helga and Clara took the train.

What the fuck? Why didn't they get paid? Someone fucked them out of their money, probably. Someone fucked them out of their money. Some jackass. Yeah, so it started again. Picked that back up again in like the 60s and in 1980s somebody's somebody that was doing it had his team scramble to get witness signatures the whole way across so he could prove that he did it when he did it in the amount of time that he did it yeah

i mean people cheat on marathons right they jump in cars and marathons and make it on the the train there was a guy i think before p Pete broke the record that I think got caught cheating trying to do it. Because, I mean, you've got to document stuff pretty detailed. And it's crazy. Like, I mean, you'd think it would be enough just to track it on your watch and upload it. Right. But, like, you know, people do goofy things. Like, they get in the back of the RV, I guess, and drive really slow.

But people who are really good at, like, looking at those GPX files can look and see like oh that's not a run that's you know they can see these variances and paces or consistencies that wouldn't be uniform with running or something like that oh interesting well maybe this should be some sort of a video recording of it like if you have a gopro in your head i want to do a live feed and just have it is that possible satellite yeah there's probably a way to do it but uh, that would be dope. Listen, man, we're in. We'll help you. Whatever we can do. Sounds like a very worthy cause and it's a crazy

undertaking and we'd be happy to promote it too and let everybody know and have people fucking honk their horn and drive by you. We're going to Dairy Queen! See you later, Zach! As long as they want to like hand off a nice ribeye or something along the way. What are you going to eat along the way?

How are you going to do, what do you like, what kind of food would you consume? Yeah, so kind of to maybe go full circle with what we started before, where we kind of talk about kind of what I periodize with carbohydrates and stuff like that, where I think there is a point where the distance is long enough, where like a strict ketogenic diet is maybe more applicable. Uh, I think it's very, um, pretty, pretty well established. Like if you'd follow a strict ketogenic diet or a zero carb diet and try to perform in some of these typical endurance events, it's going to come at a performance cost unless you have some weird, like, like outlying type

situation. Uh, and I mean, if Trent Stalingworth looked at, he's a guy up in Canada who works with a lot of the sports performance stuff. And he did some studies that actually looks at like, if you do, if you go super strict keto or zero carb, you get really fat adapted. You get really good at burning fat, but it comes at a cost of your ability to burn exogenous glucose. So like if I went zero carb for like a year and then I tried to take in my fueling strategy that I do now, my body would probably reject it

or at least I would have to be like, like really, really conservative with how much I used. Did you talk to Dom D'Agostino about this stuff? Not personally though. Do you know him? Yeah, I know I follow him and stuff. I'm actually going to be presenting

at his metabolic health summit in, I believe it's in end of January, early February. He's a very, very interesting guy because he's a super legit fact-based scientist who's also a power athlete and ketogenic for a long, long time now. Try to get him on board for this attempt. But what I'm trying to say with that is like- He'd probably help you.

Yeah. I mean, he'd be a great resource for sure. But like for something like this, like my intensity is going to be so low that like I don't technically need to be taking in exogenous glucose for something like that. So it might actually behoove me to be as fat adapted as I can get versus what I'm normally doing is I'm trying to get as fat adapted as I need to be but not necessarily so far that it comes at the compromise of being able to do my in-race nutrition fueling plan. I was always under the impression that your body always knows what to do with glucose, but that it has to be fat adapted. That's not the case necessarily? I think you probably can to a degree, but what happens is like you downregulate, like I can't speak to the science perfectly, but, uh, Trent Stallingworth did a bunch of research where it basically it down regulates the mechanism that allows you to take in glucose

and utilize it in a meaningful way. So like, you know, most people can tolerate probably somewhere between maybe 60 to 90, uh, grams of glucose per hour during some of these events. Whereas like if you went on a strict zero carb diet and try to do 60 to 90 grams of, of, uh, of sports drink or fuel or something like that, like, I don't think your body could clear it because it would have down-regulated the, your body's capability to do that. So, um, I mean, folks who are interested should look at Trent's work. Uh, he, he would be able to describe it in much better detail than I can.

So you would just go on a real super heavy fat diet? I think so. That's what I'm thinking about. I wouldn't necessarily – Just avocados, coconut oil, meat. Yeah. Just mainline those F-bombs. Yeah.

Just get as much fat as your body can take. I think a lot of fat and a lot of protein would be the name of the game for something that's that low in that – or that slow intensity in that one version. And you would try for how many miles a day? Well, Pete did it in 70, so I feel like it would be cool to try to challenge his attempt, but who knows? How many hours was he doing a day? I don't know. That's a good question. I'd have to look back and see what he was doing.

I don't know if it was consistently the same every day, so maybe that's where my plan would deviate. And I probably am going to learn along the way and maybe change things. But I do kind of like, at least on paper, that idea of targeting a 12 to 14 hour window so that I have at least 10 hours to kind of like refuel and sleep and stay on top of that stuff. And what that'll likely mean is like, maybe there'll be some days where I go well past 70 miles. Maybe there'll be some days where I go well under, and you just hope that you average to get the record. But the record's kind of secondary. I'm going to stick, if I fall off, if it's clear when I get to the Midwest that I'm not going to hit Pete's record, we're going to just try to keep the main goal in mind of bringing awareness to fight for the forgotten.

Beautiful. Well, listen, we're in, you let us know, we'll help you, we'll pump it up, we'll sponsor you, whatever we need to do. Let's make it happen. Awesome, man. Thank you. let us know. We'll help you. We'll pump it up. We'll sponsor you. Whatever we need to do, let's make it happen. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thanks, Zach. Thanks for being here. Yeah.

Hey, do you mind if I share my social media real quick? Please. I was just going to ask you that. Oh, cool. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, please. Yeah, I mean, you can find me on my website at ZachBitter, Z-A-C-H-B-I-T-T-E-R.com. Social media is Instagram, at ZachBitter, and Twitter, at ZBitter.

All that stuff can be found on my website, though. ZachBitter, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it, man. Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Joe. Bye. Bye. That was great.

Yeah.